Broadband Networking

At the moment, the Internet is both slow and unreliable for gameplay use. It's slow because most players' connections are still made with modems over ordinary telephone lines, which can't transmit much data per second. It's unreliable because the Internet doesn't provide a continuous guaranteed amount of bandwidth to each user . Instead, packets of data on the Internet compete for transmission priority, and there is no way to be certain what route they will take or how long it will take to get there. This means that gamers can't play equally; those with longer "ping times" are at a disadvantage .

The arrival of asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL), cable modems, and, above all, fiber- optic links (all collectively called broadband ) will give users a much faster connection to the Internet, although this will still not guarantee a particular minimum speed. This will have two significant effects on the games of the future: electronic distribution and higher-speed gaming.

Electronic Distribution

Our current method for distributing computer and video games is ridiculous. The object is to transfer a string of bits from the publisher's computer to the player's, in exchange for some money going from the player back to the publisher. At the moment, this is done by pressing a plastic compact or DVD disc, putting it in a cardboard box, selling it to a middleman who operates a retail store in a shopping mall, and attracting a player who drives down to the mall and buys the cardboard box with the disc inside from the retailer. The player then puts the CD in her computer, transfers the bits onto her hard drive, and throws away the cardboard. A few weeks or months later, she's done with the game and throws away the CD as well.

Electronic distribution will eliminate most of the waste that this entails. No cardboard boxes; no plastic disks; no heat, light, and security guards for the retail store; and, above all, no cars and trucks driving around the country emitting pollution just to carry the bits (at 60 miles per hour ) between point A and point B. Instead, those bits will travel directly from the publisher's computer into the player's computer. In theory, we could eliminate the retailers entirely.

Benefits of Electronic Distribution

Apart from eliminating the manufacturing waste, the single greatest benefit to electronic distribution is that it ends the battle for shelf space. At the moment, too many games are being developed for all of them to fit into a reasonably sized retail store. This means that the competition to sell them to retailers is fierce, and the biggest distributors have by far the best chance of getting their products on the shelves . Small-time developers and publishers simply don't have the sales and marketing clout to compete.

Electronic distribution will help to level this playing field. You need only one copy of a game on the distribution server, no matter how many people you sell it to, and you don't have to take down one product to make room for another one. Shelf space on the Internet is effectively unlimited. Furthermore, small developers can have attractive web sites just as easily as large publishers can. Without the need to develop expensive in-store displays or to commit marketing development funds to retailers, developers can run a very efficient sales operation directly to the consumer.

This doesn't mean that small publishers will drive the giants out of business, however. The majority of a computer game's cost is not in the goods or the distribution, but in the marketing and development ”paying all those creative people to build the game in the first place. Bigger publishers can afford to make bigger games, and bigger games will generally sell better than small ones. Bigger publishers can buy advertising space in magazines and on TV that small publishers couldn't begin to afford, and advertising sells games. They'll always have that advantage. But by taking away their control over retail sales, electronic distribution will improve the odds for small developers a little.

Piracy

The game industry loses billions of dollars every year to piracy, and many people are concerned that electronic distribution will make piracy even easier. At the moment, sophisticated large-scale piracy requires fairly expensive machinery to counterfeit the specialized compact discs that most game machines require. Publishers will be reluctant to embrace electronic distribution if it makes work easier for the pirates. We believe that this problem is solvable, but further work must be done to do it. The game industry will have to find a way to digitally "tag" each unique copy of a game and to make sure that no two identical copies can run at once. It's likely that before long, games will require an Internet connection and will not run without one ”which might not sit well with players.

Speed of Delivery

The length of time it takes to drive to a retail store and buy a game is typically 30 to 60 minutes for people living in suburban areas. If you develop a severe hankering for a game, you can usually buy it and be playing it within an hour or so. You can't do that with the Internet as it exists today; the download speeds are too slow. For electronic distribution to offer real competition to retail shopping, it must be able to gratify that desire at least as quickly as shopping does.

Benefits of Retail Shopping

There are certain benefits to selling games at retail that electronic distribution won't provide. One is that the perceived value of a retail product is proportionate to the quality of its packaging. A beautifully printed box with a heavy manual inside gives the customer a warm feeling that she is getting her money's worth. (One of the reasons that cassette tapes didn't drive LP records out of the market was that customers liked the album art on LPs ”and some mourned its passing with the arrival of the compact disc.) A CD in a jewel case alone feels cheap. A downloaded executable file on a computer doesn't feel like anything at all ”although you can see the game running on your machine, there's no sense of having purchased something that you can hold in your hand.

Although you might think that this shouldn't matter, we feel that it will have a significant psychological impact at the one time of the year more important to the game industry than any other: Christmas. The interactive entertainment business is heavily dependent on Christmas gift giving, and the fact is that people like to see actual boxes under the Christmas tree ”the bigger, the better. A slip of paper giving a web address where software can be downloaded isn't going to feel like much of a gift.

Retailers would also argue that buying in a store gives players the opportunity to look at games side by side and to ask questions of the staff. Although you can get more information by comparing game reviews online than you can by holding a box in either hand, many casual gamers don't bother to do that much research. Retail shopping offers the chance to browse in a way that online shopping simply doesn't. For all its convenience and efficiency, online shopping doesn't feel the same as running your eye over shelves full of games.

High-Speed Online Gaming

Online games currently suffer a great deal from bandwidth bottlenecks. They have to be carefully designed to eliminate any advantage that one player might get by having a faster Net connection than another player. They also have to prioritize their data transmission so that the most important data has the highest chance of being delivered rapidly , while less important data is delivered later and can be dropped altogether if bandwidth conditions deteriorate. The Swedish company Terraplay has created an entire software system to manage this problem for game developers.

As with everything else they use ”memory, processor speed, disk space ”computer games expand to consume the bandwidth available, and this problem will not go away simply by increasing the available bandwidth a hundredfold or even a thousandfold. But more bandwidth will change the kinds of games that we can play and the ease with which we play them online. Right now, when players start playing large online games, they must either buy a CD full of the graphical data or download it all, a very time-consuming process. When the game's provider wants to make a whole new region available to the players, those players are forced to download the new graphics. Either they can do it all in one chunk , which means they have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs until it's done, or they can download it in the background as they play, which hurts gameplay performance. Having more bandwidth will certainly make this a more pleasant process.

Ultimately, speeds will get so high that players don't even notice them. Network connections will be as ubiquitous as electric lights are now. (Microsoft's Xbox Live network is already broadband-only.) When this happens, we can expect to see not just games, but entire online environments that people pop into and out of continuously during both their work and leisure time. We have the capacity to create part of William Gibson's vision of cyberspace right now ”a "consensual shared hallucination" ”but only slowly and, for the most part, in two dimensions. Extremely fast communication will enable us to make it a reality, whether for gaming, working, shopping, or doing any other activity. The technology isn't in doubt; the more important question is, who will control it?