How Video Games Will Replace Film

   I woke up this morning with only one thing on my mind: "it's time to make a crazy-ass prediction". Mind you, I don't mean a crazy-ass prediction that is crazy for the sake of crazy, or an implausible prediction that you'd expect to see emblazoned next to a headline in Weekly World News.

 Satan has been known to throw up the metal horns whenever threatened

No, this prediction is not only plausible, I can guarantee it will happen one way or another -- maybe even before 2032. My prediction is that, within the next twenty years, video games will replace film entirely. That's not to say that we're going to stop wanting to watch entertainment; it means that the way we interact with and observe entertainment will merge into one form. Stop and think about that for a second.

We're already beginning to see this trend emerge organically, though admittedly, it is primitive. Interaction and immersion into games has never been so deep and nuanced as it is today. If you have the right setup, some games can completely suck you in. I've even had moments where I've been "jarred" back to reality by someone knocking on my door or a sudden loud noise while playing a game that I was completely enraptured by.

I've learned that fire alarms can be pretty damned obnoxious

As our technology becomes more powerful, our entertainment will become far more immersive as well; this sort of stuff is obvious even to someone who doesn't pay much thought to the entertainment industry. What isn't so obvious is the main symptom of all of these different forms of entertainment making leaps in what they can do technically. As, say, video games become more and more powerful in what they can do, a funny thing happens: they start to compete with film. This is already happening.

The next step in the advancement of the video game medium isn't immediately intuitive but, nonetheless, it is real. One day soon the technology will make it possible to not only play out a full cinematic experience with all the bells and whistles -- including actors, some of whom will be real "players" and some which will be simulated, and full stories that will be directed by an adaptive system that changes the experience based on your actions -- think Holodeck or Quantum Leap-style.

Unfortunately, the future still cannot make you as "sexy" as Scott Bakula

Once this level of immersion becomes technologically possible, video games will evolve into their new form: "interactive entertainment". When this paradigm shift occurs, the film industry will not so much be destroyed, but more likely absorbed. You see, this new form of entertainment will create a dynamic system where, even if you don't want to interact with the action, you could just sit back and watch someone else live out the experience in front of you. Acting skills won't be necessary because the experience won't make you pretend. It will seem absolutely real to you.

This new chimaera of entertainment will open up brand new possibilities. Want to laugh at your best friend as he tries to fend off a T-Rex with a lightsaber? Maybe you would just prefer to watch some "intellectually-handicapable" celebrity attempt to solve a murder mystery. Do you somehow have a thing for Christian Bale? Why not, then, have a simulated version of Christian Bale play every role in what would probably be the most ridiculous version of The Lord of The Rings to date.

 -The Dark Lord Sauron right after he has slain Isildur's father

To quote an overused phrase, "the sky's the limit" when it comes to the new medium. The mechanics of the devices that will have the ability to create this kind of visual and physical involvement are harder to predict, but it'd be a safe bet that by 2030 they will exist in some form. The only uncertainty, I think, is whether we'll have the right creative minds that will be necessary to truly create the sort of content that would be needed to truly bring this kind of stuff to life.

What do you think? Will my prediction come true, and if it does, what would you like to do with it?

Hall of the Great Unmade Games: The Twilight Zone

   It can be said, quite easily, that certain properties lend themselves better to different creative outlets. For example, Christian Bale might be the world's best voice-based paper shredder, but he also happens to be the world's finest narcissistic bag of loose phlegm.

    "HELLO THERE, I'M CHRISTIAN BALE AND I CAN'T REMEMBER IF THIS IS HOW MY VOICE IS SUPPOSED TO SOUND" -Christian Bale gurgling razorblades

 This is a very well established fact. Sometimes something that is incredible in one form will suck a bag full of dicks in any other. This phenomenon can be easily demonstrated by almost any professional actor that decided to branch off into a "musical career".

While this typically holds true to most forms of entertainment, one of the only notable exceptions to this rule of "quality properties staying in their genre" might be the video game industry. Now don't get me wrong, the game industry has had its share of shit-stain crossover titles -- most infamously the film-to-game genre. I would argue that the issue with even those titles, in almost every case, wasn't a problem with the concept of the games but with the team that developed them and the studio that had been trying to turn a dime out of the property by cutting as many corners as possible.

Games, if created by the right people with the right mindset, have the potential to not only hold onto the quality that the original product had, but also to increase it in a number of ways. You can almost throw anything out there and it would conceivably work as a game. Albert Einstein's Biography the Game? Hell yeah, it could work.

Assassin's Creed with numbers

Video games have this versatility because of the core concept of what makes a video game a video game: interactivity. Being able to interact with something always creates more immersion than something that is passively observed. On the flip side, if that immersion is lost --through any number of horrible design decisions or lack of creative talent-- the game will become an unsaveable failure. The unfortunate truth about video games is that the good ones are fantastic and the bad ones are painfully shitastic; that's just the way the medium works.

Here comes the interesting part: if you could, what game would you to choose to have made? Imagine if you had the ability to assemble a dream-team out of the best developers in whatever genre you would like the game to be made in, and then could be absolutely assured that it would turn out great no matter what. What ideas would come to your mind? Myself, I would choose The Twilight Zone.

Games like L.A. Noire have already blazed a trail through the old-timey TV and Film territory. Why not have a full budgeted triple 'A' title based on an early 60's TV show? A game like that would even be able to resurrect the old fashioned video game level format without beating you over the head with a "retro feel". With the right set of writers they could open up brand new stories, both interesting and terrifying, for a modern audience. With good writing it would create an excellent opportunity to tell stories with a moral interpretation attached, which is something very few developers have succeeded at doing correctly. Even better, they could replace the dated special effects of the show's time with more believable fare.

 Back when the SFX industry was based on Playdough and good intentions

Everyone has their own dream game. Some people want a return to form like, perhaps, a long dead game to have a returning sequel that does justice to the original. Some want a game that has already been made, done better; like a Halo franchise that actually tried to create some sort of emotion in the player besides rage-induced tea bagging.

In the end, even though all of these are still dreams, what would you want to see?

Apples Vs. Oranges 2: Electric Booga-fuck-you

   It has been nearly three years since I wrote my prophetic article regarding the inevitable cluster fuck that the next iteration of the PSP would prove to be. Of course, 2009 was a simpler time for the portable gaming market and I was, at the time, confident in my assumptions that the “PSP2” would either follow the Sony tried and true technique of “shiny black— but this time even more so!”, or a more experimental strategy of “plastic that is as BLACK as the void but also so polished that, like, light kinda just slides off of it: like a plastic slip-and-slide. Oh, and we duck-taped an extra screen on there too – with touch controls”. Unfortunately, the future proved to be even more ridiculous than what I had originally envisioned. And I mean, holy shit, my original vision was already pretty fucking ridiculous.

Pictured here: Ridiculous

At the very moment that I’m typing this, the new iteration of the PSP is already barreling towards store shelves faster than an alcoholic trying to desperately find the nearest Total Wine & More. So what can we expect to see in this “highly anticipated” launch from Sony?

Drum roll….

Ta-da!

Wait a second. I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong picture.

No, wait. Here it is:

Drum roll….

TA-Fucking-DA!

No really, that’s the new system. They actually managed to take fewer chances than a designated driver would on an average Monday morning. Just in case you happen to be one of those people that can’t spot differences in two nearly identical pictures, I’m going to go ahead and point out the main difference to you John Madden style.

BOOM.

And that, my friends, is that. I can count the changes of this system’s design on one hand – even if I amputated all of my fingers. Hell, I could probably still make it work even if I amputated my whole hand and tied a string around my stump so I wouldn’t forget that they added an analog stick.

This should be the point where you’re wondering whether they did anything new to the system at all and honestly, the answer is that they did add a few new features. Well, that was before the PlayStation design team got drunk and decided to add even fucking more. So if you like gimmicks then there are enough of those to make the Wii look more conventional than an Atari 2600.

But c’mon, you have to see Sony’s point of view. The people like gimmicky bizarro controls, you say? Fuck it. Let’s just give ‘em a touch screen. What’s that? Not enough? Well how about a completely arbitrary second touchpad without a screen on the back! Now we’re cooking with propane!

Happy now, fuckers?

And then there’s the godamn name.

When I hear “Vita” my brain doesn’t automatically correlate it with an amazing mobile gaming device. In fact, my brain tends to shoot me images that look like this:

But then again, that could just be because I’m American.

What about the competition? Let’s look at the Nintendo 3DS and compare how laughable Sony’s “design change” really is:

GODAMMIT

CryENGINE 3 Impressions

Hello there, prized internet gaming enthusiast demographic. I’m here, once again, with glad tidings of video gaming news and cheer.Today we got our first look at Crytek's new CryENGINE 3. How was it? Well, to be frank, it was pretty fucking badass. I mean, look at that shit.

Good luck running that on your 100$ laptops, African children

I mean, seriously. Look at it. It makes my eye balls want to escape from my skull and jump, gleefully, into the CryENGINE 3 pool of polygonal Valhalla. It looks fucking fantastic. Fuck that – it looks fucktastic. Usually, I judge video game graphics by my own patented method of “squint until it looks real” (S.U.I.L.R), but with the video above, I hardly have to squint at all. In fact, I think it looks so real that a person living in a CryENGINE 3 world would have to squint his fucking eyes while looking at our real universe just so it would match his own world’s visual fidelity. That shit is fucking bananas.

Pictured: What real life is compared to the CryENGINE 3

You remember how crazy the concept of a virtual reality world where people couldn’t tell the difference between reality and simulation was back when the Matrix was released? Well, if our graphical capabilities keep increasing at the rate that they are now, people who are released from the Matrix in the future will be begging to get back in.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.

What’s even crazier is that it is conceivable that in ten years video games may make a leap as significant as the PS1 to what the CryENGINE 3 is now. If you have even a small interest in video games then that should appeal to you. Future based simulations may advance to the point that you will be able to go on vacation without even leaving your goddamn house. And all that may be available as soon as Obama has completed his second term.

Once again, my dear friends, our epic adventure in madness has brought us to the end of this post. Since I want to leave you with something more than a nice pat on the ass and reassuring “ya’ll come back now, ya hear”, I’ve decided to post graphical comparisons of games that have come out through the last 30 years.

1980

1982

1985

1991

1993

1996

1999

1998

2001

2004

2006

2008

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