Games Computer Games : The Future of Games.

The Future of games is going to be very interesting.

Games have evolved at an exponential rate, as a veteran gamer from the early 1980's I can remember a time when the future of games might considered colour graphics. Or when the future of games might have been though of as, 'something more sophisticated than a text adventure'.

Of course things have moved on a bit since then, coming from someone who remembers 'the joystick' coming out - it could be construed that from my point of view the future of games is already here. The trouble is players have evolved with games. We can all pick up a controller that has 10 buttons and threee direction controllers and play a modern game without reading the instructions or playing the tutorial.

What worries is me is how modern games feel to a person who is not a seasoned gamer? Personally I can imagine it being quite overwhelming, you have all these buttons to remember, and some of them do different things depending on what is happening in the game. Simply controlling the game could be challenging, let alone playing it.

I always used to worry that the future of games would see a drop in quality game-play as publishers focused more and more on 'wow factor' graphics and popular licensing deals. As it happens though this never really happened. A few companies tried it over the years, who can remember the likes of 'Virtuoso' and 'Rise of the Robots' ? I think the graphics reached something of a xenith though, and improvements are now gradual. It helped that players voted with their feet and games which chased spectacular graphics but ignored gameplay were almost always complete flops commercially.

In some respects the future of games is looking bright, companies tend to focus on good game mechanics and solid gameplay. There are mistakes made, but I tend to think modern games which fail on gameplay tend to because of mistakes, rather than laziness.

A concern for the future of games is the issue of quality control. As games have gotten bigger and more complex, it's been more and more difficult to erradicate bugs, glitches and code errors. Thankfully this isn't the problem it would have been ten years ago - simply because so many consoles are internet connected and modern games are patchable.

A surprise for me, which I believe will further shape the future of games is the modern prevalence of casual games, things like Bejewelled and FarmVille and phone games. Gaming is now pushing in two directions, the hardcore games and the casual market. The casual market didn't even exist as recently as the mid-nineties, the danger is that developers and publishers start investing too much in chasing the casual market that they start to neglect the core market - the hardcore gamer. Microsoft at the moment seems obsessed with pushing it's Kinnect Peripheral and until the technology is able to provide precision control, hardcore gamers will always prefer a control pad.

A couple of decades ago I would have said the battle for the future of games was going to be fought between style and substance, substance I think won that battle. The battle for the future of games in the next two decades will be fought between casual and hardcore, personally I hope it can end in an amicable truce, with both markets supporting and augmenting each other as they should.