Reaching The Final Form

Rayan Hilal

In a world characterized by evolution, we have begun to see it take over every field possible, namely the world of gaming and game development, as more resources and technological growth are pumped into the industry as it grows to be the international business it has become. This inflow of resources could only serve the evolutionary track gaming seems to have been following in recent years, that is probably due to the tools of immersion becoming more advanced and accessible. This evolution is to be noted by examining the origins of play and the world of gaming, from its earlier days where, just as the case seems to be currently, the levels of game immersion and the tools game developers could use in order to achieve this level of immersion limited the game, by limiting the exact method of interaction and immersion between the player and the game. This interaction is based on several factors that pertain to game mechanics and storyline utilization of the technological advances owe have come to, from the limitations of the board game and now onto the limitations of perfecting virtual reality, games and their nature have only seen evolution with the evolution of the technology used in their creation.

In order to examine the ways this evolution has affected, and might affect the world of gaming in the future, we must first understand the modes in which games fulfill their roles in story telling and immersion, since unlike films games have developed a methodology of their own. As Chi Nguyen points out “In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story.”, which means that the game uses factors such as choices and spacial elements to enable this enactment of the story (1, Nguyen). These factors are only enabled via the processing speed of whichever method of gaming being used is, for example when it is a simple board game method, the world is held in the magic circle of experience that its mechanics allow, from the money to the real estate mechanics which give the game the elements it needs in order to formulate a story out of the experience of the gamer going through it. As we approach more advanced methods, the gaming console and pc become the main staples of gaming, and so are their processing speeds and rendering capabilities. Through enhanced graphics cards and processors capable of generating trillions of computations per second, the limit on what the game can simulate or evoke becomes somewhat nonexistent, which feeds towards the frictionless experience of gaming. These features make up a large portion of the experience, as Jenkins notes “Game developers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” These sculpted spaces becoming the medium in which the experience is had, which means that the more advanced these spaces are and the better designed the worlds in it are, the greater of an experience that could be had through them. (121, Jenkins).

The experiences had through gaming rely on spacial design and immersion through mimicking reality or even creating believable spaces for the game to be had in, however they also rely on the unique abilities of games in the way they relay their stories and simulate the world in which a story could take place, using not only spacial features but also abilities and inabilities given to the player which shape their decision making in the game, and give them the illusion of free will and choice. This ability to trick the user into believing the experience they are going through lies not only in the bloody walls of a game or its dark landscape, but rather for example in the player controlled character’s inability to look backwards or run fast, giving the player the feeling of being chased by keeping those abilities from them, therefor shaping the kind of experience that could be had in this game. As Jenkins and Weise point out “Because this situation is open-ended, the game designers shape our affective experience through procedural design, through the properties they program into our weapons, the potentials they design into the spaces, and the logic that delimits our options.”, games deconstruct an experience into these modes that can be individually controlled, from visual spacial features that evoke the feel needed, to the strategic abilities or inabilities given to the player, through hinderances and special weapons or abilities gained through the gameplay, the game hopes to control the player’s experience in an effort towards controlling their emotions (Weise and Jenkins, 116). This world of decision making and decision designing grows just as the world of processing speeds and virtual scenery grow, not directly through the technological upgrades to the processors and render engines, but rather through the dedication of more resources, more time and more thought, invested into the field that keeps producing newer forms of immersion in games by the year.

Examining the world of gaming and the modes used to deliver its experiential load, one could make predictions regarding the nature of the future of gaming, for as both sides of designed decision making and almost indistinguishable spacial experiences, what could the final form of gaming be. Just by watching this type of growth, the final form of spacial experiences could become a fully simulated virtual reality in which all input mimics it’s physical counterpart, while in game decisions take the form of open world decisions such as games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V, which operate too close to the realm of simulations. Having said that, the future may lie in a simulated virtual reality that mimics the ultimate story we’ve known as humans, which is life, however what if that becomes boring and simulating the life we could simply live through for free loses the kind of attention we speculate it might have, what story would games tell?