How an exhibit on video games revealed a trend in communication technology
The Art of Video Games exhibition, at the American Art Museum in DC, is a fun place to learn about one of America's most successful and important industries. In recent years, video games have surpassed movies as the main entertainment medium. Video games are everywhere. Gamers of all kinds are emerging. We play and we get hooked.
There are many things to see and do at The Art of Video Games exhibit. You will find an intriguing timeline of game development. Relics of old game consoles and games to both see and play. Mario, Luigi, Sonic the Hedgehog and Link are all there as well. Of course, the gift shop is also stacked with plenty of interesting things to check out and spend your money on.
Probably the most informative part of the exhibit are the series of panel discussion with game developers and other professionals in the field. The panels cover many topics including the idea of video games as an art form, its history and its progression. I attended one of these panel discussion and it lead me to my own thought on how simple text lead the way for video games and that this reveals a common trend. Does simple text lead the way in other technological areas as well?
The discussion panel that I attended pointed out how the progression of computer technology sets the pace for the development of video games. The artistic content in video games is essentially limited to the capabilities of the current technology. The panel suggests that this concept is exclusive to video game art but I believe that we see this trend in other things as well.
The panel included: RJ Mical - co-creator of the Atari Lynx and 3DO, Mike Mika - from Foundation 9, Rand Miller - creator of Myst , Don Daglow of Stormfront Studios and Keith Robinson - one of the founders of Intellivision. They asked the audience to imagine comparing video game art of the 70's, 80's and 90's to art of the Renaissance. "Imagine Leonardo da Vinci painting everything in black and white because at that point color hadn't come out yet."
The panel continued on how video game art is different because it is limited to the current level of computer technology. "It's like you work so hard with what you have at a certain point and you do that for several years. Then the new stuff comes out and you have a whole new realm of possibilities. It just blows your mind." said Robinson.
Miller added how the small video part in Riven, the sequel to Myst (late 90's), took gamers by surprise. "They weren't expecting a man to walk across their screen. They weren't sure that we've got to that point until they saw it for the first time and it shocked them."
Daglow talked about the very first video games he ever played, before there was even a screen. He explained how the first video games were all text. How did that work? Well, in a role playing game you would read the status of your character, where he is, what he's doing and what items and spells he has. Then there would be a challenge. "The door to the dungeon slams shut, locking you in. What will you do now?" You would then type in a command for your character. "Find a key." Or, "Use a spell on the door." Daglow mentioned how when he heard the clicking of his dot-matrix printer he got all excited. "I couldn't wait to see what happened in the game!"
I hadn't though about this in years but actually played some of these games and could relate to Daglow. When playing those old games I remember thinking, "Wow! This is so hi-tech!" "How does it work?" And all I was experiencing was nothing but white text on a blue computer screen, yet it was so engaging at the time.
Video games are a form of multimedia, which is defined as the combination of text, images, sound, animation and interaction. Text is essentially the most basic and simple of these content forms. The later are more complex and require the most computer power. The intense emotional experiences that are achieved in today's video games comes from the highly developed 3D animations, surround sounds and full-body interactions. As computer technology advances so do the level of complexity in video games.
The bar is also raised for video games because of gamers' demand for more. To suffice this need developers continually increase the level of complex multimedia content. Each new generation of games introduces something that could't be achieved before. The constant escalation of advanced multimedia content in games essentially replaces the need for reading text. So while the level of 3D images, sounds, animations and interactions are increased, the text content is decreased.
The trend of starting a new media thing with text and then moving on to other forms of multimedia is evident in other things like social media. The main communication tool in Facebook and Twitter are text messages. Each of these popular platforms enable other ways to share multimedia communications like pictures, videos and links but it's the texting that gets everyone started.
I've notice that more and more of my Facebook friends have begun sharing pictures and links where a few years back those types of posts were rare. This is probably because of peoples' level of comfortableness with the tools in social media has improved over time but also because all of the technical kinks had not been worked out yet. Today, pictures, music, videos and links are handled more efficiently with Facebook and Twitter and more people attempt to use those features. This trend should continue resulting in the expansion of the multimedia content features in social media and a lesser use of strictly textual posts. It should be more fun!
This leads me to the prediction of an increased interest in sites like Second Life, a social media and virtual reality hybrid.
Another bit of interesting technology on the horizon are the Google Glasses, which definitely need a new name. The device introduces a wearable smartphone that launches a new fun and exciting feature called augmented reality. From the demonstrations of Google Glasses it seems that text navigation and communication will play a big part at first. Expect the augmented reality feature to start-off modest and as it grows replaces the need to use basic text to drive everything.
Talking about Google Glasses has brought me to discussions, with friends and students, about the next step in bio-communication-technology. We started with phones in the home, to pocket sized computers and now computers that you wear. A chip in the brain must be next! Will we have telepathy? How will that work? Will we be able to communicate by transmitting voices to each others heads? Or, will it be text again? "Incoming message!" "Show on brain-screen SiRi."
