In a recent talk at UC Santa Cruz’s Inventing the Future of Games symposium, Will Wright spoke at length about the future of our industry and the way technology has affected our lives. He explained that players of all ages are identifying with their games more and more - citing an MMO gamer’s attachment to his or her avatar.
"Games give us different lenses to put on reality and the world around us," Wright said
Wright is a large proponent of Transmedia, the grey area between different media, but he has his own term for it: Interdisciplinary entertainment. He said that, “All of the really interesting trends in entertainment are in the intersections. I think entertainment is really ripe for this to happen right now.” This comes as no surprise as Wright’s Stupid Fun Club is not a game-specific studio.
He adds that established publishers and developers should not be afraid of new consumers coming to the industry through other sources, like mobile and social gaming. Developers need to change the way they make and sell games to reach these customers.
"Of course it's incredibly disruptive to the established companies, but to me, it's the most healthy thing that could be happening to our industry. The culture we're selling a game into is a platform in and of itself; the psychology and the demographics of the players is a platform,” he said.
Wright also compared current smartphones to a piece of fictional tech: Star Trek’s Tricorder. He notes that the things smartphones are used for can say a great deal about their users. "We're getting to the point where these things are starting to build a very interesting vision of our personal state that they can build over time,” he said.
Wright believes that developers can leverage that connection to the user to augment reality and provide a robust gaming experience. Wright said he was “really intrigued with this idea that games are engaging us in the world more than distracting us from the world.”
"It's advancing faster than I ever would have predicted," he said. “We can all be psychic in some sense."
"I think it's going to be interesting; as we come up to the human instinctual perceptual level, we'll find it a very brittle system,” said Wright, talking about the loss of human instincts as technology gets better. He explained about his inability to parallel park now, after driving his wife’s Lexus, which includes cameras and other tech to assist him.
With this new reality at developers’ fingertips, Wright cautions the industry to really think about the message it’s trying to transmit.
"We've had some idea that we can build worlds out of our imagination and create them for all to see," he said. "Anybody can do that and they're not just building their imaginary world, but shared imaginary worlds. We can put any image into the player's brain. What should we put there?"
"I think games are going to go everywhere -- every topic, platform, group you can imagine," Wright said in closing. "We're trending back upwards clearly, I think."
[Via Gamasutra]
