Gaming on Venus

As a note on this article this is really just more a creative writing piece than any sort of journalistic work. I was sitting down and meditating one day just thinking about the possibilities of the future as I often do, and was thinking more about how video games and technology in general are connecting humanity in a way never before achieved where events and people can communicate essentially by thought around the world already.


The Venus Project is a planned society designed by Jacques Fresco to try and solve the problem of scarcity in a society, in order to bring the highest quality of life possible for everyone by declaring all the worlds resources and land as common heritage among all peoples.While the idea is a bit Utopian, and improbable in the near future barring a total societal collapse, there are developing technologies such as Solar Power, Utility Fog, and 3D-Printing that may eventually actually bring us to a post-scarcity society in which goods and resources are freely available thanks to decentralized manufacturing and production. In other words, the future will allow us the satisfaction of piracy of physical goods through artificial means. You wouldn’t download a car would you? I’m pretty sure the answer everyone actually has to that question is IF I COULD! I SO VERY MUCH WOULD!

In a futuristic world like The Venus Project there wouldn’t exist any corporate entities, no big gaming companies like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc that would dictate what games come out and when and what system specs and platforms would be. Would we still have video games? How would they have progressed? What would we play them on? Would we just all have open source computers hooked up to our tvs with futuristic versions of a Steam Platform? Thousands upon thousands of Humble Indie Bundles? Not to question the fact that if we lived in such a post scarcity society anybody who had the desire to learn to develop a game could, it would open up a whole new world of creativity and diversity in gaming as more people than ever who were enthusiastic about game design could collaborate and make new games.

There’s billions of possibilities as well for the different platforms that games COULD adopt. In Star Trek’s post scarcity society they had the Holodeck which could literally replicate any sort of imaginable environment or object as a 3-D solid photonic hologram. At what year does full immersion virtual reality take effect? How will it? Would it be an open room simulation like the Holodeck, or would it be nanorobots interfacing with your brain and changing your perceptions to the point where you’re nothing but a vegetable inside your own infinite imagination. How do we know we’re not already in a simulation like that right now?

Controllers , a keyboard, and mouse, have been the preferred methods for gaming input so far. Motion controlling is still comparatively in its infancy even though there are some elaborate tech demonstrations that are quite impressive. The Seventh Generation is the first to have major adoption of motion controls on consoles. Even Razer came out with a PC accessory that’s similar to the Wii remote and nunchuck combo. Video Headgear is making a comeback in recent years from the original 80s and 90s designs. Even the legendary John Carmack who is responsible for great FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom is working on a Virtual Reality helmet for the Doom 3 BFG edition and probably a lot more applications than just that. The new Wii U gamepad is giving you a dynamically positionable screen and all kinds of input and feedback devices built into a controller not significantly larger than former offerings.

Not to mention gaming is becoming a much, much more social experience. Even more so than just online games there is now even online content in single player games. As evidenced by the Wii U where other people and players around the world will be able to observe your gameplay in real time through status updates and your own comments and feedback and interact with you even when they’re not even playing the same game but can still help you out with tips. I’m reminded of a Shigeru Miyamoto interview I once read where Miyamoto explained how he wanted the original Legend of Zelda to be a social game in the fact that people would stand around the water cooler or talk about it at school and reveal different pieces of information about the game to each other so that in a sense you’re all helping each other out to beat the game and unlock all the secrets. Now Nintendo has finally managed to devise the technology to implement that system directly into their online gaming network.

Just another sign of the connected consciousness that human technological evolution is progressing toward. Social Networking, pervasive wireless networking advances, and other technologies are continually linking more and more devices together. Kevin Warwick even implanted RFID chips into his own skin to control electronic devices like doors and lights. What if we put that same technology into an Xbox or a Wii for signing in to the console’s network? Or what if we used the impulses from his arm like he did in another experiment and used it to control 1:1 lifelike movement of a video game character or a telerobot engaged in actual combat or a sporting event for entertainment all while humans sat comfortably at home in their chairs watching from their tvs.

Xbox, aside from the last minute throw-in of the “smart glass” feature which is basically a glorified controller app, is essentially taking the direct opposite approach to Nintendo’s new gaming platform. The Kinect is all the sensors and input methods built into the console itself and having no controller other than your own body. In theory this method would be pretty unique and efficient, but in reality the Kinect isn’t Minority Report so much as it’s Microsoft Eye-Toy Waggle Fest. I can’t seem to know anyone who actually uses a Kinect for their Xbox to play Xbox games, and yet it’s a huge selling device and this past week at E3 it’s essentially all Microsoft talked about. There’s no telling what the Xbox 720 or whatever the successor shall be called will use as its primary input method as Microsoft hasn’t yet said a single word about it and they will most likely try and copy Nintendo’s idea a little more, but with as much time and energy they’ve invested in Kinect so far I wouldn’t count the device not being relevant to Microsoft’s next console in some way.

There’s really no telling what direction game input methods could take in the future with all the technology becoming more easily available. From everything to better Kinect sensors, to clothes with built in biometric and motion sensing capabilities, to holodecks, neural stimulators, to maybe even one day pure thought control over every aspect of your game allowing some sort of god-like satisfaction and utility of world creation with infinite details customized to your liking.

Would we even have consoles in the future? Would we even have computers? Currently, rather than becoming more decentralized as lots of technologies become over time, the internet and computing as a whole is moving toward cloud computing, or computing as a utility where if you could just pump high end supercomputing power through the internet to a terminal, you essentially eliminate the need for private storage, or even operating systems capable of anything more than connecting to the mainframe system and accessing your own personal desktop. For lots of personal reasons I don’t find this model a favorable one as it limits control to the individuals that own your server and your data and I’m definitely in favor of a more decentralized approach with computers a plenty and pervading our surroundings from everything to computers in clothing to computers in furniture like Ray Kurzweil predicts. To quote Isaac Asimov “I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them.”  Computers and Technology can usher in lots of exciting new possibilities and can make future experiences incredible, and allow for connection on levels never thought possible before and one of the driving forces behind that development in the future is definitely going to be gaming.

In a world without scarcity there’s no need for money, with no need for money, monetary incentive is replaced as the primary motivating factor in one’s work with self satisfaction. With no boring or monotonous jobs that leaves a large amount of time that could be devoted to entertainment and leisure. You would see works of art of all kinds in abundance in such a society. Gaming would be one such category that would evolve from largely a money making form of entertainment to one that could be freely utilized as one of the ultimate forms of self-expression. Popular games could be experienced by anyone without ownership being necessary. People would make games purely for passion and desire and could give them to others as unique gifts. You could make a game like an interactive movie where you take the lead role, you could create any imaginable scenario, even replicate the life events of another person.

I think gaming and the social interconnectedness made possible by technology will be a major part in the coming singularity as we all become one subjectively experiential collective conscious.