The Next 25 Years of Video Games

According to computer smart guy Raymond Kurzweil, by 2029 the kind of computer power it'll take to equal a human brain will cost about $1. If trends continue as they have been, what we're calling supercomputers could be made as small as a speck of dust. You could paint them on your walls.

Take the whole idea of distributed computing we talked about and multiply it several thousand times over. Computers become both ubiquitous and invisible, embedded in almost every surface you touch, with the whole atmosphere full of the data they're shooting back and forth to each other. More information than your parents absorbed in a lifetime could come firing into your brain in the blink of an eye.

Combine that with patents Sony already has for ways to fire ultrasound pulses into the brain to create real-life sensory experiences, and you've got everything you need for five-senses virtual reality. And, you don't even need the jacks in the back of your skull.

We're assuming some kind of nuclear fusion or some other kind of vast energy source is out there by this point (all this flying data will require unimaginable amounts of electriciy) and that we're not living in mud huts and fighting radioactive mutants for food. But, if we're not, PS8 Home (or whatever they're calling the digital metaverse at that point) should finally exist as a new-and-improved version of reality you can touch and smell--only noticing the transition by the sudden absence of fat.

Imagine it. In your lifetime, a magical world where you can actually meet that Burger King mascot, and smell him and feel his robes. As for the porn, well, is it even porn at that stage? It's pretty much just sex. You have sex with the porn lady and when you roll over, there's the Burger King guy to hand you a Whopper in person.

As for what sort of "games" or other entertainment would be offered there, it's possible that by then the gaming industry would have achieved its final goal: A device that makes you enjoy the experience no matter what they do. It's true that it would require electrodes inserted into the pleasure centers of the brain, but at that stage it would probably be considered cruel to not implant them in every newborn.

Electronic Arts could crank out a Shrek 9 game in a couple of weeks that features nothing more than Shrek standing in your front yard, quietly staring and occasionally farting. The whole time your brain will be telling you it's the most fun you've ever had.

You may be having so much fun in the game realm that you'll never want to leave. And that's OK, because this guy says that just down the road (around 2050) you'll be able to download your mind into the computer. Your body dies, you live on in the virtual world. Forever.

Or, you know, as long as somebody is paying the bill.

What Will Suck About It
At this stage we could very well be getting to the outer edges the long-predicted era when mankind is just an irrelevant blip in a world dominated by computers. If the combined thinking power of the world's computers completely dwarfs the combined minds of all the humans, then at this point the machines will pretty much be making games purely to entertain each other.

Or, possibly mankind will only be allowed to survive for the machines' amusement. Perhaps they'll force us to walk through hallways and shoot each other out of a desire for ironic revenge that we will have accidentally programmed into them somehow.

It's all speculation at this point. Who can predict what will happen on that day when Spore has, generations later, culminated in systems powerful enough to create entire universes and even simulated minds to populate them. You would reach a point where the population of simulated beings in existence dwarfs the real ones.

Even stranger, the simulated people born inside the simulation would have no way of knowing they were in a simulation. You may have heard that guy in The New York Times say that mathematically we are almost certainly living in one of those simulations now.

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