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Gallery: Game Designers Talk About the Future of Fun

By Jon Irwin Posted 2.8.12 at 1:26 pm 3 Comments

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Cliff Bleszinski, Design Director, Epic

"Technology is like water or fire or alcohol. It can be used for a lot of good or a lot of evil." So the flashy steward of Gears of War told me over the phone. But it can?t do either if people have limited access. When asked about an existing technology that could improve gaming, his answer is as simple and immediate as a chainsaw bayonet to the face: "Everybody connected, all the time, on high-speed internet."

Where he lives, in Raleigh, North Carolina, almost everyone has Wi-Fi. "Go ten minutes outside of town, there are still people who aren?t even connected or are on dial-up." Bleszinski wants the future of gaming (and shopping--he finds retail stores "ugly and a complete waste of time") to be all-digital.

"If you can create a console or a device that is merely a portal, that can render video manipulatable in real-time, then you can have infinitely powerful graphics in the cloud or in the back-end. Once we get to that point with consoles, and the console becomes more of a portal than stationary hardware, then things start getting really interesting."

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Read the article: Videogame Designers Envision The Future of Fun

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3 Comments

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amdreallyfast

02/09/12 at 3:40 pm

I agree with Dr. Pippin Barr. Technology advances can be great, but I would like to see more innovative designs work their way into big games instead of remaining in indie-land. For goodness sake, most applications don't even support multiprocessing very well. While there are many excellent games, in the grand scheme of things, both technical and artistic design have room for improvement in video games today.

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biribe

02/10/12 at 3:47 pm

Shameless plug warning, but we (Gaikai) totally agree with CliffyB and are doing everything we can to enable this vision. It's still early days, but the future of cloud gaming is incredibly bright and moving fast. The combination of new cloud-optimized GPUs, tablets that support game streaming, and social media platforms like Facebook and Youtube, the game gets very interesting. Times are changing!

Check out the latest.
www.gaikai.com

Also running on LG's Smart TVs with no console required.
www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697720/lg-smart-tv-streaming-games-via-gaikai-video

And on future game tablets that can play full AAA games via streaming, even with a standard controller.
www.wikipad.com

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turtle_254

03/03/12 at 6:24 pm

remember it's just a game guys

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