Eric Cosky

There is another parallel to be made between the games industry and the film & television industries. Much like how film & television coexist peacefully and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, so will MMO and single player games. In each case, they both serve different needs. To say they serve different audiences is only partially true; it’s more correct to say they serve different content which provide different expectations (and limitations) which suit people in various degrees depending on their mood.

The expectations that MMO players have for the content and evolution of the games they play are similar in ways to what I think people have for television series they enjoy. A certain amount of comfortable entertainment is to be had when a person can expect a familiar yet slightly new twist on a familiar story or game. There are limitations to how far from the original story, character development and so forth that a series viewer will tolerate before they lose that comfortable feeling. For instance, if a character on the series "Friends" suddenly switched from being such a nice person into a mean person, nobody would believe it and many people would simply be annoyed that one of their comfortably defined personalities suddenly became something other than what they had grown accustomed. Along the same lines, if you take a well defined, long standing game mechanic or game storyline and arbitrarily change it from what players have grown comfortable with, you will risk the same kind of effect. Players are not amused when the rules suddenly change for the same reason they do not like sudden character changes, it breaks the connection with the content and they are then forced to decide if they still like the content before they will commit any more time to the experience. The risk of alienation is increased.

I just returned from a trip to Alaska where I broke 10,000 photos on my Nikon D70. It's been a great camera during the past 20 months; it has been the source of a much frustration and eventually, great satisfaction. Hitting 10,000 photos inspired me to write a bit about my experience because prior to owning this camera I had next to zero knowledge about photography. My previous video experience gave me a leg up on composing and the bare mechanics of how to take a decent picture when I could use the automatic modes, but after a while I started seeing the shortcomings of the automatic modes and thus began the real learning process as I began experimenting with all the other settings this camera provides.

Here's a cropped portion of photo 9999. While it isn't the best photo of a breaching whale, I'm pretty happy with it because I've gone from being a full-auto user to almost complete manual control of all settings which is the case in this photo. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this was the lucky image, I still consider myself lucky to get anything resembling focus and decent lighting much less both with such excellent subject matter. I wouldn't have picked this as my best photo (obviously it's a bit dark and the whale isn't perfectly focused) it just happens to be the one that rolled the odometer over so to speak.



The full size version of this photo and many more can be seen on my gallery site.

Max Headroom, that computer generated character of a previous century - remember him?

This computer generated guy spoke to people in real time. Or so it seemed, anyways - I wasn't really sure if the first iteration of that was in fact real time.

Skip forward a few years, we now have webcams that can overlay cartoons on top of digitized video in true real time. Pretty funny stuff actually.


What I can't help but wonder is where will this eventually lead? It seems likely that given enough progress in technology, we will be able to generate real time images of people that quite simply look like real people but are completely computer generated. Today, it's easy to imagine Half Life 2 quality faces and expressions extending the tech that already exists today. 10, 15 years from now - who knows how realistic it will look by then. You may not even be able to tell the difference. If & when we get to that point it will be because we have reached the limit of the Max Headroom function of simulating humans in realtime.

I know I’m not the first person to notice this but I’ve been saying for a few years now that the video game industry is in the same sort of situation that the movie industry must have been in at some point. From what (little) I know, sometime around the 1920’s the tools of making movies finally started to stabilize. I see a similar thing happening to the games industry. The process of making games is starting to be fairly well understood, including the tools, processes and even the social dynamics of the people involved. At some point the filmmakers stopped building their own cameras, developing their own film, and found a system that generally worked for making and selling movies in a reliable manner. Something much like that is bound to happen to videogames.