2011 was a pretty good year at the box
office. Despite the industry claiming that their world will soon end
because of piracy, ticket sales do not lie. Harry Potter 7 Part 2
made $169 million in a weekend, the highest of all time before The
Avengers. Transformers, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, all had
blockbuster years at the box office.
And each one of them got their ass
kicked by video games.
Harry Potter 7 Part 2 was the highest
grossing film of 2011 and made huge waves for having a $92 million
opening day. Modern Warfare 3 made $400 million in 24 hours. In five
days it passed $750 million, a mark Harry Potter took nearly two weeks to pass. Transformers 3 came in second place at the box office
and over its entire run made $350 million in the United States. Elder
Scrolls V: Skyrim made $450 million in five days.
And video games are terrible.
Video games lack so much creativity
that Mario is still a best seller. Imagine if you went to the movies
and Marty McFly was having another grand adventure with Doc Brown.
That's what video games are like. For those who don't understand the
reference that's because Back to the Future came out in 1985, a
few years AFTER everyone's favorite plumber.
But it doesn't matter. Because video
games are the future.
And it is only going to continue.
With the exponential growth rate of
technology there is no doubt that video games will soon dominate our
conscious lives. Currently it takes a certain kind of dedication to
become truly entrenched in a game. There are far too many barriers to
immersion for most people to sink into a game. Controllers can be
foreign to non-gamers, screens can't replace real life.
But the barriers will fall away.
As time passes, technology will become
easier to use, more user friendly and more connected to every day
tasks. Just last week Google patented an infrared ring that users
wear on their finger to control interfaces on augmented-reality
glasses. Microsoft is releasing the Kinect for PC this year, which
will likely replace the keyboard with swipes of the hand and voice
commands. If those are not two sentences out of a sci-fi novel, I
don't know what is.
Gaming, as it's known today, is the
real future. Just as it only took a few years for smart phones to
become the majority of cell phones on the market, the gaming
revolution will happen faster than we can understand. It won't happen
when a gaming company invents a new technology, or programs a new
graphics engine so that monsters look awesome. Those things will
already exist. True innovation isn't about invention but combination.
The transformative moment is not
Google's Project Glass or Microsoft's Kinect or any single idea. The
transformative moment is when a game is released that combines so
many different elements that it becomes more than a game, it becomes
a way of life. At first there will be a relatively small group, as
there always is. Then that group expands. What's going to be
different about the video game revolution is that it will have no
reason to stop expanding.
The common quip is, "That sounds
like something out of a sci-fi movie." No arguments here, there
are countless books, essays, shorts and movies that all predict a
similar kind of future. What may be unclear is that books and essays
and movies are just ways of bringing imagination into reality. When
technology advances to the point when an all-encompassing "game"
is feasible, all those writers and filmmakers and all the fans of
those writers and filmmakers will become the first wave of gamers.
Science fiction is the imaginative precursor to manifestation in the
physical reality.
A new book will soon be released by TED
that discusses the Hybrid Reality that will exist for the next
generation. Life will be lived as a hybrid, taking place in both the
physical environment and the virtual one. Robotics will continue to
take on greater workloads in the physical environment
while humans become more involved in the virtual worlds we create.
According to Hybrid Reality, "what human civilization needs more
than anything is not greater IQ or EQ, but TQ: technology quotient."
The ability to adapt and use advanced technology.
Which makes for an interesting debate
between those currently using technology and those who are out of the
loop or shunning it entirely. If you're reading this then chances are
you fall into the former camp, and my position should be fairly
obvious. With time the differences will become even more stark.
Since birth there are those who have been upping their technology
quotient, preparing, in a way, for the video game revolution. Now
that the future looks so bright there is only one thing to do...
Keep gaming.
