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Being in a typically bored "Oh my God what can I do?" Sunday mood, I was rooting through some ancient PC magazines I found, and stumbled across a review of Doom. The reviewer was raving about the 3D graphics, and how realistic the game was. Of course, looking back at Doom today, it looks really dated and crude, but it still remains a great game. All this nostalgia got me thinking: "What next?” 3D graphics represented such a paradigm shift in computer gaming; it’s hard to see where the medium will go from here. The addition of that extra dimension gave games so much more depth and gameplay, but since the first tentative venture into the third dimension, very little has really changed since. Okay, so we may have more polygons being thrown around the screen than ever before, and fancy lighting effects which make games amazing to look at, but for all these technological advances and expensive graphics cards, the style of these games have hardly changed since Doom. People may say “But look at games like Half-Life and Deus Ex. You can alter the outcome of the game, and do whatever you want.” I would agree, up to a point, but you can only really do what the designers have made it possible to do. You can’t, for example, climb on a plane and go off on holiday for a couple of weeks to a destination of your choosing. It would be physically impossible to squeeze that amount of detail into a game without turning your computer into a gibbering wreck in the corner. In that sense, the interaction we have in these virtual worlds is extremely limited, we see it on a screen and interact with it with a mouse and keyboard, much as I am doing typing this in here. I'm not saying that I'm dissatisfied with today’s games, on the contrary, they are great fun to play. I just can’t help but think what is going to happen next. The powers that be predict that this type of paradigm shift happens every five to ten years, so were just about due for the next one. The problem is, I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.
Burb
Quonous just wondering why you decided to pick that username.
It reminds me of Q'onos the Klingon homeworld.
It reminds me of Q'onos the Klingon homeworld.
Being in a typically bored "Oh my God what can I do?" Sunday mood, I was rooting through some ancient PC magazines I found, and stumbled across a review of Doom. The reviewer was raving about the 3D graphics, and how realistic the game was. Of course, looking back at Doom today, it looks really dated and crude, but it still remains a great game. All this nostalgia got me thinking: "What next?” 3D graphics represented such a paradigm shift in computer gaming; it’s hard to see where the medium will go from here. The addition of that extra dimension gave games so much more depth and gameplay, but since the first tentative venture into the third dimension, very little has really changed since. Okay, so we may have more polygons being thrown around the screen than ever before, and fancy lighting effects which make games amazing to look at, but for all these technological advances and expensive graphics cards, the style of these games have hardly changed since Doom. People may say “But look at games like Half-Life and Deus Ex. You can alter the outcome of the game, and do whatever you want.” I would agree, up to a point, but you can only really do what the designers have made it possible to do. You can’t, for example, climb on a plane and go off on holiday for a couple of weeks to a destination of your choosing. It would be physically impossible to squeeze that amount of detail into a game without turning your computer into a gibbering wreck in the corner. In that sense, the interaction we have in these virtual worlds is extremely limited, we see it on a screen and interact with it with a mouse and keyboard, much as I am doing typing this in here. I'm not saying that I'm dissatisfied with today’s games, on the contrary, they are great fun to play. I just can’t help but think what is going to happen next. The powers that be predict that this type of paradigm shift happens every five to ten years, so were just about due for the next one. The problem is, I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.