If you want to know where videogames are headed in the distant (and perhaps not-too-distant) future, you only need ask yourself: what can videogames do that other media can’t? The answer, surely, is unprecedented interactivity. We loving watching movies and reading books, but they’re all about what other people do. Part of their appeal is that we have no control over the outcome. In videogames, however, we do.
Admittedly, it has taken many game designers quite a while to cotton on to this simple fact. There have been many great games in the past that have been almost completely linear – Super Mario, for instance, is still a superb game, but the player has not a lot of control over the direction of the story. The great games of the future will be massively interactive, allowing the player control over many small factors that have an effect on the story. Already, games like this exist. Strategy games like Civilization allow an effectively infinite amount of routes to the end. However, it still suffers from what I call the “board-game effect”. Without sounding too poncy, this is basically that it is an expanded version of what can be done on a board game. If anything, Civilization is probably too complicated for its own good – classic games like chess are much simpler to learn, yet still allow for infinite possibilities.
However, I don’t agree that the way forward is to have horrendously massive worlds which couldn’t possibly be explored by the player in their lifetime (for one thing, how could they be made in a lifetime?). After all, it’s still a game. How can we possibly enjoy something that’s so overwhelmingly huge? (Ahem) No, no. The size of the game has to come not from the physical size of the world but from, as I already mentioned, the size of the interaction. Presently, choice in videogames is explicit. That is, if you’re playing Final Fantasy, say, the game will present the choices to you on a plate, after which you can leisurely take your time to choose. In real life, though, choices aren’t always like that. You can make decisions based only on your thoughts, and not necessarily on outside conditions. If I wanted to, I could rob a bank tomorrow. Admittedly I’d probably fail, but nevertheless it’s possible, and the choice wasn’t necessarily presented to me by anyone else. This is what videogames will be like in the future complete freedom. Or will they?
Notable game designers like Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) have observed that