Gaming Hardware

Many aspects of game design are independent of the hardware running the game: subject matter, theme, and art style, for example. Nevertheless, the future of interactive entertainment is closely tied to the future of computing hardware. At the moment, the principal emphasis in hardware design is on making games look and sound better, and, indeed, the amount of audiovisual improvement in the last 20 years has been astonishing. But game hardware does much more than that: It determines how complex and how smart the games can be. And that, in turn , affects the kinds of games that we can make. We have just started to build games that simulate the behavior of humans , for example, at a level above the trivial. For more powerful simulations, we need more powerful machines.

Specialized game hardware might include dedicated neural network processors and voice-recognition or speech-synthesis chips. We might see special chips dedicated to solving path -finding problems or to simulating thousands of cellular automations such as ants in an anthill or soldiers on a battlefield. In the farther future, there could be chips that know the grammatical rules of a language and can generate real dialogue on the fly rather than prerecorded responses. Whether such gear gets out of the laboratory and into consumer products is another story; it depends more on what it costs to build than on how useful it is to games. But hardware R&D for games is already taking place, and it will increase now that game development is starting to be recognized as a legitimate subject of academic study.

In the next few sections, we talk about some of the game hardware that's commonplace today and where we see it going.

Location-Based Entertainment

Location-based entertainment is a fancy term for any kind of computer gaming in which you play somewhere besides your own home. Typical kinds of location-based entertainment are video arcades, group ride simulators, and individual networked simulators.

Video Arcades

Video games were first introduced to the public as arcade machines because their computing hardware was too expensive for ordinary people to afford. These were extremely popular, and video arcades proliferated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. However, as microprocessors and memory became cheaper, the home video game console appeared and offered serious competition to the arcades. Parents liked home consoles, too; kids could play at home rather than down at the mall, and although there was a higher up-front cost to buy the machine and games, you could play them endlessly for free. The arcade game format is also very limiting for the game designer because the games have to be designed to make money every minute or two.

The heyday of big video arcades is over, except in entertainment locations such as movie theaters and theme parks, and in places where kids are likely to be stuck for a while with nothing to do, such as airports or hotels. This doesn't mean that arcade machines are dead ”only that they will never again occupy the niche that they did when video games were new. They now have to compete with home console machines. Many arcade machines create their appeal by offering something that you can't get at home, such as expensive hardware ”a driving simulator with a force-feedback steering wheel, pedals, and a gearshift, for instance. Such games will certainly continue to exist, but the high cost of manufacturing them means that they will have to charge a lot to make back their initial cost.

Group Ride Simulators

A group ride simulator is a room designed to give a small audience ”typically 20 or 30 people ”the impression of riding in a vehicle. The floor is actually a large platform, typically fitted with theater seats mounted on pistons. The audience faces a large movie screen on which a story is shown, and the pistons cause the floor to move up and down to increase the feeling of movement. Surround-sound speakers complete the effect.

Ride simulators are extremely expensive, costing several million dollars to build. Most are not interactive at all, but they just consist of a short movie with an accompanying script that controls the movement of the floor. However, it wouldn't be difficult to make these simulators interactive by giving the viewers something to do that affects what they see on the screen. At the moment, the movies are mostly made on film to present a high-quality cinematic experience, but they could easily be replaced by a computerized 3D environment. The audience can be given weapons or other controls whose effects are seen on the screen. These could also have an effect on the platform. If some of the players handle a large gun, for example, the pistons could simulate the gun's recoil . We can certainly expect to see continuing advances in the realism of the experience.

Ride simulators won't ever become a large-scale phenomenon like video arcades were; they're just too expensive. Because they have to admit people in groups for short periods, they require a large audience who can afford the time and who are willing to wait in line for a while. This makes them perfect for theme parks and resorts. The future of such simulators is dependent on the economy in the same way that tourism and all forms of expensive leisure entertainment are.

Individual Networked Simulators

Individual networked simulators are groups of small enclosed cubicles, sometimes called "pods" or "cockpits," each designed for one person or perhaps two. The pods are networked together to play a single game so that people can compete against each other alone or in teams . These simulators are not usually owned by individuals. They are installed in shopping malls and similar places, and players pay to play for a certain amount of time. They offer high-quality, multi-player gaming, usually of vehicle-based action games such as flight simulators or mechs. Because the player is usually completely enclosed , these games also offer a highly immersive experience. The BattleTech Centers (www.virtualworld.com) are a good example.

The arrival of the Internet ”and especially broadband connections ”has reduced some of the demand for these centers. Although the quality of the experience playing on a PC is not as immersive, it's also much cheaper, and you don't have leave home to do it. We expect that networked simulators will remain a small niche market with demand proportionate to their price. They will, of course, continue to benefit from improvements in computing hardware, but as with ride simulators and the fancier arcade games, the majority of their production cost is in the mechanical rather than the electronic gear, and that's not going to change as rapidly .

Home Video Game Consoles

Game consoles have won the hearts of consumers, and they're here to stay. Designing a game console is tricky business because the manufacturer has to balance the console's cost against its computing power, to compete against other consoles on both price and performance. Unlike PCs, consoles can't be customized over a whole range of performance characteristics. Instead, all consoles of a given model are identical (or nearly so) so that any game made for that model is guaranteed to run correctly. This means that the manufacturer gets only one chance to design it properly. We see a number of trends in console machine design that will affect gaming in the future.

Consoles Get More PC-Like

There's no doubt that home game consoles will continue to take advantage of the growth in computing power: faster CPUs, more memory, better audio and video technology. These will have the greatest impact on the look and feel of the games we play. More important, however, home game consoles are starting to take on some of the characteristics of their more powerful cousin, the PC: disk drives and networking capability. It won't be long before this also includes such things as video cameras and voice-recognition facilities, with all the implications for multi-player gaming that those represent. These features will enable console players to have game experiences currently available only on PCs: to download and store game upgrades or new scenarios on a disk drive, for example, and to play against other people around the world. As consoles get more PC-like hardware, we can expect to see an ongoing convergence between console and PC games.

The Relationship of Consoles to Other Media Players

Game consoles are now capable of playing audio CDs and video DVDs, which means that there's little need to own a separate media player for each of those devices if you already own a console. We don't expect that game consoles will entirely supplant standalone versions of those devices because some people will want media players without the gaming capability. Nevertheless, we believe that consoles will be an increasingly important part of the family's "entertainment center," the cluster of equipment located underneath the TV. One game console with a built-in DVD drive and hard disk drive could replace four separate dedicated machines: the CD player, the DVD player, the VCR, and a digital video recorder such as the TiVO service. Consoles have the potential to become complete computerized "entertainment managers," if their manufacturers want to take them in that direction.

Add-On Devices

We believe that the market for add-on devices such as dance mats and other specialized controllers will continue to grow. As game playing occupies an increasingly larger slice of people's leisure-time entertainment, they will invest in gear accordingly . Although only a minority of gamers will buy them, these devices' profit margins are much higher than those of the base machines, making them a lucrative source of revenue for the hardware manufacturers. And such gadgets do make the experience of playing games designed to take advantage of their particular features much more enjoyable.

HDTV

The Achilles' heel of all home console machines is their output device, the conventional television. The television's low-resolution , 25- to 30- frames -per-second refresh rate and 4:3 aspect ratio are just adequate for displaying movies and TV shows, but they don't allow either the detail or the speed available on personal computer monitors .

We think that the growing popularity of high-definition television (HDTV) will significantly improve home console gaming. A wide screen offers a more natural viewing experience, allowing events to take place in the player's peripheral vision. The higher resolution will allow for more detailed images and more complex user interfaces. A number of Xbox games already support HDTV resolutions , and as HDTV becomes the standard, all new generations of consoles will certainly do so.

Personal Computers

The personal computer is a little more than a quarter of a century old now, and it looks set to be here for a while. Although the appearance and capabilities of the PC (by which we mean all personal computers, not just the IBM PC and its clones ) might change, even a hundred years from now people will still want a computing device on which they can read and write, do research, and process information. There's no reason that that device shouldn't also provide them with interactive entertainment.

Of course, personal computers are going to become more powerful. They will get better sound systems and larger, higher-resolution monitors. Development of graphics hardware will continue to drive ”and be driven by ”computer games, and this will enable richer, more detailed scenes. As with home consoles, sheer computing power will make the biggest difference in the way games look and feel on the PC.

Add-On Devices

Over the last few years, we've seen a variety of specialist hardware for serious gamers: force-feedback joysticks and steering wheels, automotive and airplane pedals, and so on. Those will continue to sell ”there's no particular reason for them to die out ”but they won't ever routinely be bundled with PCs because the demand for them is too small to justify the expense. Virtual reality gear fits into this category as well. It's expensive and unnecessary for most personal computing tasks , so it is unlikely to ever be routinely bundled with personal computers.

Even with advances in handwriting recognition, the pen will not replace the keyboard as the primary interface for the personal computer. The typewriter superseded the pen as a means of creating text because it was faster and less tiring to use, and that won't change. The combination of keyboard and mouse is perfect for most applications except actual drawing. Professional artists use digital pens (graphics tablets) with personal computers, but few other people do, and pens certainly have little use in gaming. There has been a certain amount of debate about gesture-recognition devices, but they, too, have the disadvantage that they're tiring. Nobody wants to have to wave his hands around for hours at a time. This is exactly why the mouse was invented in the first place: Early researchers recognized that the touch screen, or any system that requires you to lift your hands from the desk, was impractical for prolonged use.

Voice recognition, on the other hand, has tremendous potential in gaming ”more even than in business applications. Although dictation is faster than using a keyboard, talking eventually becomes tiring and makes for a noisy, distracting office environment. But games are noisy anyway, and suspension of disbelief will be greatly enhanced by being able to shout "Group one, charge!" rather than pressing the 1 key and clicking a menu item labeled "Charge." And, of course, microphones are already very much in use for communication between players in multi-player gaming; this will only increase with the growth of broadband Internet connections.

Why Consoles Won't Kill Off the PC

Every time a new generation of consoles comes out, a number of pundits pop up on the Internet and in the gaming magazines to proclaim that the PC is dead as a gaming platform. They're thinking about the fact that the game console now closely approaches, or even surpasses, the computing performance of the PC at a much lower price. And as we said in the previous section on consoles, we can expect to see a growing convergence between console games and PC games as console hardware begins to include such features as disk drives and Internet access.

Nevertheless, the PC is here to stay as a gaming device because its appeal is not based on its performance characteristics alone. The most important difference between the PC and the console is not its hardware, but simply where you sit when you use it. The PC is designed to be used at close range by a single person because that's how we need to use it when we're working on documents or surfing the Internet. Certain games ”construction and management simulations, for example ”are best played that way as well. The game console, on the other hand, is designed to be used by one or more people, sitting farther away so they all can see. This is great for multi-player experiences such as sports or fighting games, okay for flight simulators and action games, and terrible for any game with a complex, multi-level user interface. That's the area in which PCs excel.

Controversial Subject Matter

Another reason why consoles won't kill off the PC as a game platform is that the PC is the only platform on which you can explore controversial subjects. To publish a console game, you have to obtain the approval of a publicity-conscious hardware manufacturer. Recently, Canadian artist Robin C. Pacific produced Babes in the Woods , a game whose object, among other things, was to find pubic hair for a Barbie doll and whose culminating reward was to enter The Great Yoni. You probably won't see this particular title on the Nintendo GameCube anytime soon. The best thing about the PC is that anyone who has one can create a PC game. Neither a profit-gobbling license nor a hugely overpriced development kit is needed, which is why the PC is where the most cutting-edge work is always done.

Continuous Technological Advancement

Finally, the technical quality of PC games will always eventually surpass that of the games on any given console machine. This is because a console machine is an inexpensive device that remains technically static from its launch until it is finally superseded by a new model. The PC, on the other hand, is an expensive device that continues to improve year on year. (There have been a few efforts to construct console "upgrades," such as the Sega 32X and CD drive add-ons for the Genesis, but none was really successful ”people don't seem to want to upgrade their game consoles.) If you have a game design that demands the very latest technology, the PC is the only place you can put it.

Handheld Game Machines, PDAs, and Telephones

From the simplest toys that play only one game on a black-and-white LCD screen, to the latest color cartridge-based machine, handhelds are a hugely popular gaming medium, especially for children. Rugged, portable, and relatively cheap, they offer increasingly sophisticated games that until recently could only be played on much more expensive machines.

There's a lot of talk about the convergence among handheld devices, and although it's bound to happen, that doesn't mean that all handheld devices will merge into a single, universal portable computer. There will always be mobile telephones without any real game-playing facilities for people who only want a telephone, and there will always be low-end handhelds with no wireless capability. Nobody wants their four-year-old racking up long-distance charges by accident .

The practical limitations of handheld devices are not in their computing power, which will continue to grow, but simply in their physical dimensions. A handheld can't get bigger than a certain size without becoming a nuisance to carry around. Although you can get a very enjoyable gaming experience from a handheld device, it will never be as immersive as sitting in front of a high-resolution monitor with big speakers and a subwoofer jarring your bones.

We expect to see a slow but steady growth in gaming for handheld devices. Telephones and phone-equipped PDAs offer the most potential because players can compete against each other. Single-player PDA games and dedicated handhelds of various sorts will necessarily remain fairly lightweight. Without a CD-ROM or DVD drive, handhelds can't produce the "big" gaming experiences of a Baldur's Gate . But handhelds offer excellent growth potential for games for the casual gamer ”someone who wants to play for 10 or 20 minutes as a break from the daily routine.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a term for a technology that tries to make the player forget where he really is and to feel as if he's in the game instead. In practical terms, this means loading him down with a helmet that includes earphones and a pair of miniature liquid-crystal displays for stereo vision, as well as a position sensor that can determine what direction he's looking. VR was considered something of a holy grail for gaming a few years ago, but it has almost dropped out of sight again. The gear is expensive, and unless it's carefully calibrated to the individual user, it tends to give people motion sickness.

Still, there's a lot of potential for the technology. If you've ever seen a really good 3D movie ”one projected with polarized light, not the old red-and-green glasses ”then you know how powerful the effect of stereo vision is. On a big screen, occupying all your peripheral vision, it really does make you feel as if you're in the scene. To do this on a computer means computing two different images, one for each eye ”and, of course, that requires twice as much graphics processing power. To reduce what's called "visual stress" ”making the eye work harder than it normally does ”VR gear must operate with high resolution at a high frame rate and with sharp focus.

We think there's a future for virtual reality in games, but it's several years off yet. The quality of the helmets needs to get much, much better, and the cost needs to get much, much lower. In any case, VR is unlikely to become the standard way of playing. Many people like to play console games in groups, and they enjoy interacting with their friends as they play. Shutting out the rest of the room with a VR helmet will significantly degrade that experience. VR will probably be at its best in single-player or multi-player networked games.