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The Next 25 Years of Video Games

By David Wong, Steve Woyach October 2, 2007 478,040 views
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2013:
Badass Handhelds With Even Badderass Web Connections

A PS3 in Your Pocket
We'll be at the generation of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox ... 720 or whatever they decide to call it.

Now, the gaming industry' greatest obstacle has always been the fact that humans eventually have to go outside. This is why handheld gaming is such a big deal these days The best-selling game machine isn't the Wii, PS3 or 360. It' the handheld Nintendo DS, by a huge margin.

People need something to do in all those settings where, in the old days, they used to read a paperback (at the beach, waiting at the airport) and kids need something to do on car trips or in detention. Both groups tend to be avid non-readers.

Come 2013, you should have a portable as powerful as a PS3 or 360 (portables run about a generation behind), which is pushing the limit of what the human eye can even perceive on a little 4-inch screen.

Now, saying handheld gaming is the future right after saying online gaming is the future may sound like a contradiction. After all, wireless Internet access is spotty and cell phone Internet makes you feel like it' 1997 all over again. But ...

The Miracle of 4G
This is where 4G comes in.

4G is the upcoming standard that will give you a wireless connection at 100Mbit/s, anywhere. That' more than 30 times faster than the best DSL connection you can get at home, kids.


Above: The Nokia 4G phone concept, currently in the
"Make-an-awesome-Photoshop-of-it" phase of development.

Whatever the virtual-gaming universe looks like at that point, be it World of Warcraft 2 or the second generation of PS3 Home or a sprawling descendant of Spore, you should be free to access it anywhere, at any time, from your handheld.

Also, this nearly-unlimited Web access will probably signal the end of physically buying games off the shelf. Electronic Arts is not going to see the point in selling boxed games for $60, when they can have you download it for a fee, then pay another monthly subscription fee to play it (the scheme that made Blizzard rich off World of Warcraft).

What Will Suck About It
As you may have already guessed, this era of "download anything, anywhere, anytime" also introduces the era of your mom screeching up the stairs after she opens up a $600 monthly gaming bill.

That bill won't just be from little Timmy buying new games or paying subscription fees on existing ones, either. It'll be from buying in-game content. Already you Xbox-360 gamers can spend real-world money to get extra cars in Forza 2.

It will be a money-making bonanza for them. For us, well, some day we'll reach the final boss' castle and meet a dragon who tells us that the only way to prove we have the heroic heart of the Chosen One is to give him 20 bucks.

Of course, being gamers, we'll still spend most of our time wishing for the Next Big Thing. Which brings us to ...

Recommended for Your Pleasure

112 Comments

"But anyway, Spore looks pretty cool and we're looking forward to it."

made me lol

6/14/2009 1:14:36 PM
SnaveNareik

This makes me want to cry. I don't want to be alive that long.

5/13/2009 10:21:41 AM
LOZERwendy

Sometimes Cracked has dick jokes, sometimes it has wacky historical factoids, and sometimes it has visions of the future that blow your f*****g mind. Thanks, Cracked. I am scared as s**t of the future.

Also,
"There will be two kinds of people in the next 100 years: Those who trust technology, become transapient and the next step in evolution - And then the people who don't wish to evolve, mistrust technology, and fear change. Guess which one will be around longer, and which one will be wiped off the face of the earth as a matter of eventuality."
Hmm, I'll have to get back to you on that, Magneto.

3/23/2009 5:27:22 PM
stillhilarious

That'll be so kick-ass. I'd just not get into it and let everyone else sit around in their virtual world. In the real world there would be nobody to stop me from doing whatever I wanted.

"Let's go play with some TNT!"

"I feel like joy riding in a tank today."

"Lets play God and splice the genes of every animal togather."

3/20/2009 2:32:58 PM
Nicholas

This is going to be hell on earth. Think about it, no free will, no actual friends, no face time with anybody, NO HUMANS!! I dont know about you, but I think I would rather be dead then not have friends, and lives, and sports, and actual love, and meaning to life. The scariest part about this though is that it would be the most evil time in existence because there would be no religion or the bible to tell people to do good, in fact, jesus would be completely forgotten. No one would go to heaven anymore because (from the christian fate) no one would be able to get saved because they wouldnt be able to hear anything about any of that. So I'm pretty sure god would bring on the apocalypse before any of that could happen, because he wouldn't ever allow that to happen. So that stage in mankind will never happen because mankind wont be in existence.

3/20/2009 2:20:14 PM
johneridoe

This is seriously making me want to go live in a hole in Nunavut, living off venison for the rest of my life.

2/22/2009 3:08:44 PM
Witchfinder

i'm seriously beginning to wish I'd been born 20 years earlier

2/14/2009 12:39:08 PM
TAKEN

"There will be two kinds of people in the next 100 years: Those who trust technology, become transapient and the next step in evolution - And then the people who don't wish to evolve, mistrust technology, and fear change. Guess which one will be around longer, and which one will be wiped off the face of the earth as a matter of eventuality."

My guess is the ones who will be around longer are the ones having sex with real people, instead of the ones boinking machines.

1/18/2009 10:03:33 PM
Caegn

the difficulty would have to be so damn high on those games it would make insanity mode look like a walk in the park...
lets hope the future doesnt end up like harvest of stars lol

1/17/2009 10:24:11 PM
Scifi_Lover52

To add on to the ironic revenge, by then medical technology will have probably advanced far enough for computers to be able to revive us. They could literally make us respawn. We could be trapped in real-life Counter-Strike for eternity.

1/5/2009 6:06:08 PM
Sledgeham

Something that troubles me is the skill factor of such games. How would there be any skill in a game controlled by brainwaves (considering that you could react just thinking about it)?

11/26/2008 2:28:47 AM
Umup0

That last part reminded me of the song Color my world by Eyedea

11/6/2008 10:02:27 PM
Skipmuntz

I'm looking forward to this, as long as there's a way to resist all the corporate bullshit (and you know there's gonna be a lot of that.) Hopefully adblock and spybot will still be around...

10/1/2008 11:32:13 PM
MajorWood

There will be two kinds of people in the next 100 years: Those who trust technology, become transapient and the next step in evolution - And then the people who don't wish to evolve, mistrust technology, and fear change. Guess which one will be around longer, and which one will be wiped off the face of the earth as a matter of eventuality.

10/1/2008 1:32:11 PM
RobertsTheVile

Yeah. The future is going to suck some extremely serious camel ass, from the perspective of us, now, with free minds and wills looking forward into its ghastly inevitability. But I suppose to the f*****g zone-implanted pleasure-slave zombie eunuch triple A quadraplegic sub-human freaks who will be our descendants, it will be awesome. An IV shot of primordial vitamin soup to start the day and then nothing to do but lie around in your own nanobotically processed filth and experience sexual ecstasy and adrenaline rushes in your cerebellum without ever suspecting that there might be an actual reality out there. All things considered, I'd much rather have our society overthrown by Skynet and have my descendants grow up badass, fighting Terminators--even if they end up extinct. Every man dies. Not every man truly shivs a robot with a f*****g C-4 polearm.

9/14/2008 8:19:53 PM
ardmore

Page 5: Donator is not a word.

8/14/2008 12:33:04 PM
TehJoker

interesting but how can the computer make people irenavent...if people created the technogly wouldnt that let the computers only be as smart as the people who created all the programs to run all of this.lets say the computers tell al of us the kill each other who is telling the computer and what is stoping us from not doing it. if the computer controlls your brain even who is saying thatthe computer is in controll if mankind created the computer to do just that... and now in rambling so imma stop and get out of serious made ad quit typeing.

8/10/2008 10:17:02 PM
wadeg

And the difference between Home and 2ndLife is that Sony take precisely no crap in these situations. They are not afraid to take away your key to the virtual world if you're making it worse for anyone else.

8/9/2008 3:16:42 AM
Indigo_Dingo

Techno dependence wiping us out...man, thats freaky.

8/9/2008 3:14:52 AM
Indigo_Dingo

Somebody may have already mentioned Accelerando by Charles Stross. Fiction novel all about the what he refers to as Singularity. When mankind hits the point where supercomputers are painted into walls. It actually is very likely. Who was it? Something or other Fermi... the Fermi Paradox says is there are intelligent civilizations in the universe, how come they haven't come visiting. The answer proposed in the novel Accelerando is that all those civilizations hit singularity and dismantled their solar systems for computer resources. Other civs stay at home to be near the bandwidth, rather than travel the depths of space.

8/8/2008 2:15:07 AM
Indubitableness

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