This link has been bookmarked by 24 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 May 2009, by Mark Harding.
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27 Dec 10
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17 May 10
James ChoateI've just given one of the keynote speeches at the LOGIN 2009 conference here in Seattle. Here's more or less that I said ... Imagine you're sitting among a well-fed audience of MMO developers and gaming startup managers (no, nobody video'd the talk):
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24 May 09
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21 May 09
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19 May 09
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16 May 09
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15 May 09
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The steep part of the sigmoid growth curve is already behind us.
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14 May 09
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After processor performance (and by extension, memory density), the next factor we need to look at is bandwidth. Here, the physical limits are imposed by the electromagnetic spectrum.
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I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes indistinguishable from a death ray.
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Telephony itself is turning weird this decade. If your phone is an always-on data terminal with 100mbps coming into it, why would you want to make voice calls rather than use Skype or some over VoIP client? Computers are converging with television, and also with telephones. Or rather, both TV and phones are shrinking to become niche applications of computers (and the latter, telephony, is already a core function of the mobile computers we call mobile phones), and computers in turn are becoming useful to most of us primarily as networked devices.
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The iPhone has garnished a lot of attention. I've got one: how about you? As futurist, SF writer and design guru Bruce Sterling observed, the iPhone is a Swiss army knife of gadgets — it's eating other devices alive. It's eaten my digital camera, phone, MP3 player, personal video player, web browser, ebook reader, street map, and light saber. But the iPhone is only the beginning.
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Storage is basically so cheap it's nearly free. Why not record a constant compressed video stream of everything you look at with those glasses? Tag it by location and vocalization — do speech-to-text on your conversation — and by proximity to other people.
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prosthetic memory
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We talk about the casual/hardcore split, but that's a bit of a chimera. We've always had hardcore gamers; it's just that before they had consoles or PCs, they played with large lumps of dead tree. I lost a good chunk of the 1970s and early 1980s to Dungeons and Dragons, and I'm not afraid to admit it. You had to be hardcore to play in those days because you had the steep learning curve associated with memorizing several hundred pages of rule books. It's a somewhat different kind of grind from levelling up to 80 in World of Warcraft, but similarly tedious. These days, the age profile of tabletop RPGers is rising just like that of computer-assisted gamers — and there are now casual gamers there, too, using a class of games designed to be playable without exotic feats of memorization.
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If I was speccing out a business plan for a new MMO in 2025, I'd want to make it appeal to these folks — call them codgergamers. They may be initially attracted by cute intro movies, but jerky camera angles are going to hurt their aging eyes. Their hand/eye coordination isn't what it used to be. And like sixty-somethings in the current and other cohorts they have a low tolerance for being expected to jump through arbitrary hoops for no reward. When you can feel grandfather time breathing down your neck, you tend to focus on the important stuff.
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I have short-sightedly ignored the possibility that we're going to come up with a true human-equivalent artificial intelligence
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the most interesting thing in the games of 2030 will be, as they are today, the other human players.
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Here in the world of human beings — call it monkeyspace — we are all primates who respond well to certain types of psychological stimulus. We're always dreaming up new ways to push our in-built reward buttons, and new media to deliver the message.
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Nevertheless ...
Welcome to a world where the internet has turned inside-out; instead of being something you visit inside a box with a coloured screen, it's draped all over the landscape around you, invisible until you put on a pair of glasses or pick up your always-on mobile phone. A phone which is to today's iPhone as a modern laptop is to an original Apple II; a device which always knows where you are, where your possessions are, and without which you are — literally — lost and forgetful.
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