We are at the dawn of a new age

We are at the dawn of a new age.

Five years ago there was a term thrown around a lot by marketing people to describe those who were liable to pick up on new technology as soon as it arrived, that term was "early adopters" As with most things on the rapidly changing face of the web this term is already out of date. I believe there are so many emerging new fields that a blanket term like "early adopters" simply can't be applied.

Look at the rapidly changing tech behind blogging. This is a field that 2 years ago didn't exist. Blogging was something us geeks did in the privacy of our own homes, throwing ideas and concepts out into the virtual ether as fast as we could develop them. Fast forward 24 months and the parts of the 'Net that deal with Blogs and Bloggers even has its own name, the blogosphere. Politicians take it seriously, News organizations discuss the death of the Newspaper and both the political sphere and professional News organizations are debating whether Bloggers are Journalists and should their activities be protected by law?. All this because a couple of Geeks liked to tell the world how they were feeling via the medium of HTML.

Back to "early adopters" and the evolution of gaming. Currently we are eagerly awaiting what is generally accepted as being the 3rd generation of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. 3rd generation?, in Europe that's barely time to claim you have started a successful business, in genetics you haven't even started to see any sort of true variation, even in the development of something as new as the automobile, the third generation would only put us in the 1930's. As gamers and game developers we are only just beginning to explore the very edges of the massive virtual worlds that well eventually explode out of the development studios.

Men like Raph Koster, Peter Garriot (Lord British) and Brad McQuaid (Aradune) we will some day look back on as contributing to the foundations of the worlds of the future, both virtual and RL. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them in the last 5 years we have experienced an evolution of the English language the like of which hasn't been seen since the Angles ran into the Saxons a thousand years ago. The Leet of hackers became multiplayer FPS jargon, became MMO speak and has moved into the world as TXT language. The makers of games like Quake and Half-life forced a massive and rapid evolution of 3D video cards, the MMO makers took the expanded graphics capabilities and ran with them to create worlds that became more and more immersive.

People said there was no more space in the MMO market for another player, that the MMO genre was a limited one, there were even articles about the death of Massively Multiplayer gaming and then came Blizzard and the World of Warcraft. In the space of one day Blizzard blew all previous business models out of the water when they claimed a sell through of 600,000 units in the first 24 hours. A year earlier nobody would ever have believed that such a thing was possible. Within a year they were claiming 2,000,000 players in the Western world and talking about another 2,500,000 in China, within 3 years they are talking in terms of 10 million players.

Suddenly the MMO wasn't just an American phenomenon, the bulk of the cash flow was coming from outside the continental USA, people all over the world, mothers, fathers, grandparents, bankers, mechanics were switching on to this new thing called massively multiplayer and they were having an absolute blast. Those of us who had already played through Ultima On-line and Everquest watched this sudden eruption of new players with a wary eye. Would they stay?, would they change the genre? would all the carefully built social norms we had evolved from our previous gaming experiences disappear?.

The answer to all of these questions appears to be Yes. They have stayed, the genre is changing and so are the social models we had evolved. And yet we are only just starting, even Blizzards massive player base of a claimed 10 million accounts is minuscule compare to the largest selling games of all time. Biggest selling game of all time is Super Mario Brothers with sales of 40.24 million boxes. Final Fantasy (series) 32,000,000 Gran Turismo 17,000,000 Legend of Zelda (series) 36,000,000 The Sims (series) 100,000,000

More information can be found at: http://www.video-games-survey.com/software.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_video_games

Suddenly we are talking about serious money. When you consider the current business model of buy and then pay to play, executives at companies like Sony and Microsoft look at game sales like that and probably start to dribble. Imagine everyone who purchased Halo and Halo 2 signing up to pay Microsoft 10US$ a month to play on-line. The growth and decade long dominance of Sony as a player in the world of electronics was started with the Walkman but was continued with the Playstation. Its only in the last few years with the emergence of Microsoft into the console market that a true competition has evolved, something which is all good for gamers.

Once the big boys start playing, things tend to get moving fast, competition brings development (second only to war) throw the gaming toys into the mix with the world of the on-line warrior; fighting to keep the corporations out of your hard drive and TV, the fighters for digital freedom and open source , the communities of players itching to get their hands on the tools to modify gaming platforms and take them to places the original engineers simply could never have conceived of. Mix all of that into the emergence of broad band, into a world were data and money moves faster than anyone would have believed a decade ago.

The world wide web, once a place for freaks to download porn and share small programs they had written with their friends, has now broken into the homes and businesses of everyman, the modern business world would virtually collapse without the ability to push huge amounts of data around across international boundaries at high speeds. When all of those things come together in the heads of people who are programmers, bean counters, hardware and network engineers, artists and writers, all of whom are fundamentally Gamers, the future is unleashed. Give these teams access to faster CPU and GPU's, more and faster RAM and FSB, bigger and faster drive space and the bandwidth to push all this data around and the possibilities of what can be done with this tech become limitless.

Seamless, immersive living worlds become a reality. Gaming goes beyond simply being a "Game" and becomes a way of life. I think we will look back in 20 years and from our comfortable force feedback seats, wearing our 3D display cups over our eyes and we will remember that there was a time Before Warcraft (BW) and time Post Warcraft (PW) and that the time Post Warcraft evolved in ways we couldn't even begin to imagine as we sat in front of our desktop monitors and read actual text on a 2D flat screen.

We will come to a time where we are always on-line in our virtual worlds from our personal mobile networks. Software will flow from us like expelled breath, businesses will fight wars across binary battlefields of data and people once regarded as freaks and geeks, people who once proudly wore the tag "Gamer" will stride across the digital medium as Warriors and Wizards of the new reality, only now they will be working for countries, intelligence agencies and Corporations.

We are at the Dawn of a new age...