BUSINESS
Video games to rival cinema, books and TV
14-01-2003
by
By 2020 video games will be in the "top-tier" of media formats, on a par with movies, books and television claim experts.
Speaking at the Media Lab Europe 'Open House' in Dublin on Tuesday, France Telecom researcher Jon Orwant outlined a vision for the future of video gaming, one which will see the media format equal movies, books and television in terms of both market size and influence. More significantly, Orwant said that over the next 17 years, game makers will become increasingly creative and daring, producing games that only slightly resemble today's work.
"It's my contention that virtually anything could be turned into a game," Orwant said during his speech.
Orwant acknowledged that some industry figures already show that the video games industry is larger than that of movie sales, but claimed that the comparison was unfair because cinema-sales figures include only US box office sales. Adding DVD/VHS rentals and sales, as well as foreign box office and merchandising revenues to Hollywood studio sales radically alters the comparison, he noted.
But over the next 17 years, this disparity will erode, with the importance of video games growing more rapidly after 2009 to eventually become "a dominant cultural force." This growth in the early part of the next decade will be sparked by two important factors, Orwant said; new middleware and game design tools, making the production of games easier, and the integration of video game consoles with set-top boxes. This latter move is one that Sony and Microsoft are said to be considering.
In terms of specific gaming platforms, types of games and game/controller interfaces, Orwant was hesitant to suggest that any single type of hardware or software would dominate. "I think that there will be room for all types," he stressed repeatedly throughout. The same maxim will hold true for massively multiplayer (MMP) on-line games, player vs. player games, and human vs. computer games.
In the short term, however the sector will be hampered by a number of factors. Chief among these, according to Orwant, is game publishers' unwillingness to embrace games that are truly unique. In fact, Orwant described many of today's new video games as "formula driven," saying very few unique games have been created since the 1980's. "If USD10 million has to be spent on creating a new game, they (game publishers) want to be sure it's going to pay off," Orwant said.
By 2010, this attitude will have dissipated, he predicted, and a new breed of so-called "Indie Games" will emerge, Orwant predicted. Other areas set to see major growth in the years ahead include product placement, or advertising, in video games, a trend already clearly visible in many existing top-of-the-line titles already.
An MIT Media Lab graduate, Orwant is a principal research scientist at France Telecom and teaches game design at MIT. He created Mammon (the world's first investment game), the Extensible Graphical Game Generator, and the annual Internet Quiz Show. Orwant also founded The Perl Journal and is the author or co-author of a number of books on Perl.
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