Imagine how people would have been shocked, when the Lumière brothers screened what is known to be the first movie in the history. Contrary to what present people think, what people at that time were really shocked at was not the train that seemed to be coming toward them, but movement of tree leaves by wind as a background. Most people, similar with this example, even those who are wise and early enough to have prospects on the future, are unaware of or misunderstand the impact of new media. Today, new media such as social media is expected to bring a new century in any field of studies. Games are in the limelight and are expected to frame the world in the 21st century. As said in somewhere, game defines the 21st century, while cinema defines the 20th century. Game is “important,” indeed. Yet, it is still difficult to predict “how” it would be important.
Today, game industry changes day by day by the cutting-edge technology. Whatever or however experts view the future of game and the human world, I have my own imaginary view on the meaning and the future of game entertainment.
When I was designing my homepage at the age of 12, I had dreamed designing the homepage depicting my room. When people knock at the door, they would be welcomed. They would enter my room, and they would see what they want to. The more they look closely, the more they would able to know about me. I would conceal things by the degree of favorability or interest visitors have on me. Anyway, I have dreamt my cyber room; realistic and detailed enough to resemble my real room yet more beautiful to reflect my ideal. However, there was this problem of technology; at the year of 2001, making such elaborate computer graphic was too demanding for a elementary school student, and even now, it is difficult as well.
I expect that the development of game would help people to develop such ideal cyber room. Today as social network service is very popular, I believe that the field of game and the field of SNS would meet some day, and would make synergy effect big enough to change the human world.
Movie, game, and the SNS― they all have one thing in common, the story-telling. People’s desire to communicate with other people is all associated with the story-telling. Basically, it has existed along the human history. Actually, movie and the game have overlapping areas to a great extent. Andre Bazin finds the original form of movie in the mummy in the ancient Egypt. People have desire to preserve the present. From that motif, all visual art has developed to suffice this human desire. Television, which is considered to bring tremendous effect on today’s people, was initially stemmed from the film industry. These days, 3D effect and Computer graphic has changed the paradigm of the movie industry, and extent of movie development meets at the extent of game industry.
This human desire applies same in the world of texts. There is a similarity between the development of text and the picture.
When web environment became common in the world, hypertext was used as the language of the computer world. And here appears the hypertext fiction, or the hyper text writing. Hypertext writing has developed its own style of fiction, coinciding with the growth and proliferation of hypertext development software and the emergence of electronic networks. Contrary to traditional type of writing, an advantage of writing a narrative using hypertext technology is that the meaning of the story can be conveyed through a sense of spatiality and perspective that is arguably unique to digitally networked environments. An author's creative use of nodes, the self-contained units of meaning in a hypertextual narrative, can play with the reader's orientation and add meaning to the text.
Critics of hypertext claim that it inhibits the old, linear, reader experience by creating several different tracks to read on, and that this in turn contributes to a postmodernist fragmentation of worlds. In some cases, hypertext can be more a problem to get appealing stories than a tool to develop creativity. However, they do see value in its ability to present several different views on the same subject in a simple way. This echoes the arguments of 'medium theorists' like Marshall McLuhan who look at the social and psychological impacts of the media. New media can become so dominant in public culture that they effectively create a "paradigm shift" (Lelia Green, 2001:15) as people have shifted their perceptions, understanding of the world and ways of interacting with the world and each other in relation to new technologies and media. So hypertext signifies a change from linear, structured and hierarchical forms of representing and understanding the world into fractured, decentralized and changeable media based on the technological concept of hypertext links.
Likewise, picture works exactly same as the text. The idea of hypertext becomes real in the game. Movie could be compared to the traditional type of writing, in this case. Game has its own narratives. That is different from mere cyber world life such as today’s twitter of second life. Game has authors. Game has clearly winners and losers. Game clearly reveals the rankings, so identical to today’s world. Story gets different by the selection of individual player. Montage and misè-en-scène would be optional; people would see things in multi-angle.
Applying these kinds of idea, SNS would be blended with game; and each individual would have their own-developed game. Visitors (players in the game) would experience a person’s life in the way they want. Achieving a person’s ideal and dream would be more easier in the game world. If they fail, they would reset the game.
Technology has developed enough to afford this demand. By 1996, the rise of Microsoft Windows and success of 3D console titles such as Super Mario 64 sparked great interest in hardware accelerated 3D graphics on the IBM PC compatible, and soon resulted in attempts to produce affordable solutions with the ATI Rage, Matrox Mystique and Silicon Graphics ViRGE. Tomb Raider, which was released in 1996, was one of the first third person shooter games and was praised for its revolutionary graphics. The faster graphics accelerators and improving CPU technology resulted in increasing levels of realism in computer games. During this time, the improvements introduced with products such as ATI's Radeon R300 and NVidia's GeForce 6 Series have allowed developers to increase the complexity of modern game engines. PC gaming currently tends strongly toward improvements in 3D graphics.
