Life, The Universe, And Gaming — Browsing For The Future [Column]

Foreword: Before I begin, allow me to first bid a warm Durban welcome (which means I’m going to eat a mutton bunnie on his car bonnet and then give him sunburn) to Adam Meikle who published his first column, last week. So it was a stereotypical first column that did what all other first columns do. We still enjoyed it, didn’t we? Oh, also, like me he is from the University of Striking For Reasons Undisclosed Kwa-Zulu Natal, though he is from Howard college and I’m from Westville campus. That is all.

Think back to when you were a child (assuming you’re not, right now, a child (being a child at heart (or immature) is fine), of course) and the only place where you could find proper gaming, assuming you were into it at the time, was the arcade. You get off school and are on your way home or perhaps waiting to get picked up, and you sneak into the nearest shop which has an arcade game, and you spend your hard-earned fifty cents that your parents just gave to you, trying to kill Shao Kahn or get to that fiftieth level in Snow Bros or rescue Princess Peach (bitch) or, well whatever it is that you’re expected to do at the end of Contra. Remember those days?

What changed…

Well, simple really. The advent of consoles and armchair gaming came about. No longer did you need to leave home to get games of that quality, no longer were you forced into spending hundreds of rands (yes, hundreds, those fifty cent coins add up, you know) on gaming at some shop somewhere. Now you could spend hundreds of rands on gaming right in your home, on your own television no less. Needless to say, console gaming took off like a tsunami (too early?) and washed over the world with Sony’s PlayStation at its crest. Sure consoles existed before that, but not until the PlayStation did gaming truly move towards the console era (let’s not disregard the fact that PC’s are included here, but you get my point) and essentially kill off the arcade gaming era as we knew it.

Fast forward a bit and let’s talk about the present.

We have games that push the boundaries of graphical fidelity and surrealism. Games with stories that rival award winning novels. Games with audio crafted by master composers. Games that a few decades ago never even factored into the imaginations of those who dared to dream. All of these are achievements in gaming. A sign of how far we’ve come since the arcade gaming days of old. Crysis 2 is probably at the pinnacle right now, of the achievements we’ve made in the visual department, so far as games go.

And yet there are still so many people too busy playing Farmville to care…

The next obvious question would be, “Why is this?” and it’s a bloody good question. The way I see it, life today is very mobile, in fact almost everything is mobile-centric today. The “mobile device” as we know it, previously known as a phone, is capable of so many practical uses: camera functionality, music, instant messaging, internet, GPS and more. In a world where you’re always moving around and never able to enjoy being in a single place for too long, what takes a back seat? Everything that is static. And right now, console gaming that relies on being connected to a single stationary point, is static. Sure you can disconnect it and take it around with you, but would you really? Imagine carrying your Xbox 360 around with you wherever you go, just so that you can get the gaming experience anywhere? And this of course assumes you’ll find something that it can plug into.

In today’s world where you will spend more time at the office or at campus or school than at home, gaming time obviously takes a dip. Everyone has felt that at some point or the other, or perhaps had that realisation that it’s been weeks since they’ve played a proper game. It’s quite a mortifying realisation when you’re a gamer.

As a gamer, you have a sort of itch that needs to be scratched, so when you can’t scratch it in the conventional way (at least recently) that you’re used to, where do you turn?

The office, campus, even school, okay not so much the latter but those lucky enough to still be in school probably get time for gaming anyway. They all have one thing in common: They suck donkey balls. But also, the internet.

With the internet you get all sorts of sources for procrastination and fun and distraction from the real reason that you’re at the office or at campus.

Herein lies the future of gaming.

Your internet browser (Firefox or Chrome, the rest simply don’t exist, or shouldn’t, except to download either of those) is essentially your gaming platform when you’re at the office or at campus (from here on referred to as “Mordor”) and the games that you play form the basis and the topic for this article.

As it is, already we are moving towards a more browser-based gaming experience. Recent Facebook apps such as the aforementioned Farmville, Mafia Wars and other such random time-wasting excuses for games are slowly taking over and big gaming companies have started to notice this trend. Through metrics and pure observation, it’s become clear that when people feel a need to procrastinate, internet gaming is where they turn. And it is to internet gaming (from here on referred to as “social gaming”) that the large developers will soon turn. Now you may think me silly for saying this (I do) but the facts speak for themselves, and mind you it’s not all bad. Gaming hits of yester-year already exist on the internet. One need look no further than the completely browser-based Quake Live to see that.

Gaming companies themselves are also showing their social gaming stripes with such games as Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed’s Project Legacy and BioWare’s Dragon Age Legends which I of course play when I’m otherwise free and able to do so, at campus.

What is interesting to note, and perhaps can be explained in a single word (which I’ll of course mention because I know it and stuff), is that the advent of social gaming, much the like the advent of console gaming before it, is bringing in huge swathes of otherwise non-gamers and converting them to our gamer ways. Suddenly mass numbers of bored office employees and students are going onto the internet and onto these social networking or browser-gaming sites and keeping themselves occupied with the games on offer. When they’re not tweeting or updating their statuses about it, of course.

The reason for the sudden growth in numbers so far as social gaming goes can be put down to a single, simple word: Gamification.

Essentially, gamification is when you add on such things as experience, levelling up and other such RPG stalwart systems, to something menial and otherwise boring, in order to spruce it up. To quote an example that Dean recently made: Imagine each time you cleaned your room you got an Achievement Unlocked popup and an increment to your proverbial gamerscore? You’d clean your room all day every day and then mess it up just so you could clean it up again. That’s the idea behind gamification. Developers know that people won’t otherwise do something without incentive, so they use such ideas as a sort of carrot on a stick, and goad people into playing on further. Every gamer has at some point in their life, fallen victim to the “just one more level-up” scenario where an entire night passes with them zombie-ish-ly playing some RPG for that “just one more level-up” through some twenty in-game level-ups. It’s addictive and it works. And developers of otherwise useless and boring games have picked up on it.

Look around the sites you visit. Everything is slowly being gamified. Each time you log onto certain sites and get points of some sort, just for logging on. Some forums now have experience systems for posting and replying to threads. Websites reward you with medals for certain actions. Gamification is all over the place, already. And it’s working. Post counts aside, people want the metaphorical e-penis enlargement that comes with gaining accolades and rewards to show off. And this is where social gaming gets away with it because it is easily accessible within areas where boasting or competing for said accolades actually is possible (unlike at home where only your little brother or sister knows and doesn’t even care anyway), because of that “social” element. You can acquire some great achievement in Farmville (frowned upon, yes, but go with the example here, for a bit) and then fifty of your friends will try to compete with you for that, whereas if they hadn’t known, they’d either not have bothered or wouldn’t really have been focusing it as much. Who wins here? Social gaming. It is an almost self-sufficient fire given the right application (literally) and it is without doubt, the future for gaming.

And if you need further evidence of this, then you need look nowhere else but towards the upcoming OnLive which will allow the streaming of today’s games, to a TV, PC or (eww) Mac over the internet. Yes, over the internet.

So what’s then to say that the inimitable Half-Life series won’t one day make an appearance (or lack thereof) on a browser a few years from now if Valve ever decide to release the next in Gordon “The Free Man” Freeman’s adventures. What’s to say that we won’t get a Final Fantasy quality Final Fantasy game released over the internet. What’s stopping BioWare from making Mass Effect Online a properly online experience with its only requirement reading as “Mozilla Firefox” and yet still looking like a game out of present times?

Well right now, the only thing that stops that is the technology currently widely available. Don’t get me wrong, console gaming will be around for a while to come, but social gaming is most certainly the long term choice.

Do I like it? No, I can’t say I do especially enjoy the fact that games like Farmville and Mafia Wars will be seen as the patriarchal stalwarts for an era of gaming, but at the same time, I feel like it is something that will happen and therefore something that needs to be properly adopted now, by larger developers, if they are to survive and not go the Atari route once browser-based gaming takes over the world. Web-based and social programmers are already so far ahead in this department.

That said, there is no need for panic. The transition, when it happens, will be a smooth one and will take time and there is a long, long time still left for armchair, console gaming. We just need to accept it and instead of fighting the change, look for the positives in it. Imagine being able to carry your entire library of games (through the wonders of internet streaming) in a portable, handheld device (that totally isn’t Sony’s NGP) and be able to play them in all their graphical splendour, wherever you are, whenever you want.

If that isn’t an exciting prospect, then you are lost to the future.

For those who don’t know, eGamer runs a weekly feature on browser-based games (I promise I didn’t even plan this) for your enjoyment while at Mordor. Please check it out some time.