Eric Cosky

The phrase "Web 2.0" is generally considered to mean a web where the users are able to easily create content that becomes part of the web. Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, all that stuff is part of the browser experience for anyone visiting any reasonably current part of the web these days. It's been a great change for the better, too. For those of you who don't recall or weren't on the web at the time, websites were for the most part extremely static because most people had yet to realize the possibilities that hooking a database up to a dynamic web page could do (not to mention all the multimedia now available). In other words, extremely boring unless you were a true geek such as myself. Slowly at first, and then explosively, this changed as content became dynamic seemingly overnight and the Net became a lot more fun as a result. I hope - and expect - the same will happen to MMO games in the future. The players really will be active participants in creating the content for content-driven games and not just sandbox environments like Second Life. While there are definitely challenges to making it work, I think it can be done.

Net Neutrality is a subject that is extremely important and we would all benefit from having as many people as possible understand what it is and why it is so important. The Internet has always been a neutral entity, serving as an open line between computers and ultimately people across the globe in a way that facilitates commerces and creativity. But times have changed and now the businesses that operate the communication infrastructure are doing everything they can to make the Internet an ally in their quest for profit at incalculable expense to our society. Technology has advanced to the point that these businesses now have the ability to charge us based on who we are communicating with, instead of how much of their capacity we actually consume. It is similar to if a gas company charged more for fuel because you drive a car made by a someone the gas company didn't have a marketing arrangement with. Or simply wouldn't provide fuel at all to cars unless the car manufacturer paid off the gas company for the privilege of using their fuel. This is not unlike the Net Neutrality debate going on today and it is an abhorrent business practice that should be illegal. But it isn't, at least not yet. That needs to change.

I saw an article on GamePolitics.com called Schindler’s List - Would You Play the Video Game?. One of the responses to the article suggested that it was an insult to make a 'game' about the Holocaust or other serious, heavy topics and that it would hardly be a game at all. I have to agree with that; a game is by definition is about amusement, competition and fun in general. It seems to me that calling a serious experience about sad, terrible or other topics not compatible with the descriptions of "game" would be inaccurate. We must, however call these things something. The way the situation is now it's like calling all movies "comedies", which is of course absurd. I think the term "serious games" is equally inaccurate. In the other direction, I think "Interactive Media" is not specific enough because this covers pretty much anything that takes input from the user which includes things that do not necessarily have an emotional component to them. I haven't seen a hierarchy of the taxonomy of terms used to describe games before, so I'm going to go out on a limb and create one:

Social security numbers are terribly, terribly unsafe. They are now used for far more than they were ever intended for which was to simply track contributions to the Social Security system. The creators of this system recognized the potential for and the problems that could come with a tracking number being widely used and this is why they made efforts to limit it's use to Social Security and Social Security alone. Unfortunately, the functional convenience of an individual tracking number proved too tempting for many industries and has in a decades-long process of feature creep is now the basis of identification for all sorts of financial, medical and legal matters and with that has come all the problems the creators of this system had intended to avoid. The root of the problem is that there is now a single point of failure making it easy for almost anyone to become victimized by identity theft. Fortunately, there is a solution.

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.

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.