Casey Deans

Game Design 1

José  P. Zagal

Futurecast

In the year 2034, videos games will pursue a full simulation of reality including all the senses of the human body. Placing the gamer into the game is sought after by external and internal machines. The merging of flesh and circuit carries with it deep philosophical ramifications. As humans begin to become more machine like, machines begin to become more human like.

Putting the player into the game with engrossing gameplay is the first phase, the second phases is then physically putting the game into the player through their senses. The hands were the pioneers of the journey into the digital game frontier. Joystick and buttons begat mouse and keyboard which begat controllers which begat headsets, gloves, mats, and boards which begat camera sensors. Always external, never requiring ingestion or surgical implementation, these devices focused on touch and sight. The vibration of the controller turned sinister in “Never Say Never Again”, when James Bond played by Sean Connery engaged in some PvP with Largo (the villain). The video game was called Domination and it was played on a fictional futuristic device which sent increasingly strong electro shocks through the joystick of the losing player.(Never) The evolution of the controller achieved a major milestone with NASA’s first full body suit and helmet “controller”, which they titled “Vitruvian” due to its appearances similiarity to Da Vinci’s drawing.. Originally developed as a means to slow down bone decay due to time spent without gravity, this suit eventually was developed with the hope of offering it to the public as the next big thing in gaming. The suit was a equipped with over a thousand sensors of varying types and was attached to a series of rubberized tensile strings. These strings were attached to a giant exterior apparatus. This apparatus was a large circle frame with a magnetized floor. The circle was housed in a large cube. The strings would pull on the body simulating touch while the magnets in the suit and floor would simulate gravity. Haptic feedback was truly astonishing because the player would fall, be pushed, patted, stroked, punched, and otherwise influenced by the hundreds of strings and the constricting parts of the suit.  The astronauts soon grew very bored with the simple exercises included in the initial software. NASA learned that replicating the “feel” of reality is very different from replicating the “touch” reality. Their biologists were amazed to learn just how strong the psychosomatic relay system inside the human body was as even the human body began to reject the “Vitruvian”’s placebo of reality.  Acti-EA-Star, the corporate conglomerate super house created from the merger of Rockstar, Activision, and EA, brokered a deal to create games for NASA in exchange for exclusive rights to the technology for five years after it was released to the public.

During the process of research and development, Acti-EA-Star attempted to include the other major senses of the human body. “Vitruvian” was rebranded as the “BodyShocker” in its early development phases. “BodyShocker” was given an array of high tech aerosol canisters in the hopes of adding smell to the experience. A mouthguard system was included which had assorted artificial goos which would, hopefully, recreate taste. Sound was delivered in a combination of collar bone vibrations and twenty-three surround sound speakers. Early concepts for an inner-ear attachment were quickly shot down and binned as being “too intrusive” and “too dangerous”. Everything turned out to be “too dangerous” when an overzealous designer altered the code regulating safety measures and tested out the machine after hours one night. When her body was found, her limbs had been nearly torn off and 84% of her skin was covered in bruises. Thankfully, it was determined that she had been knocked unconscious and suffocated by the mouthguard goo shortly after the machine began glitching and dangerously pushing and pulling her. The case received so much attention that all “BodyShocker” and “BodyShocker” related external peripherals were scrapped. Years later, it would be shown that both NASA and Acti-EA-Star, had been selling the technology to the black market from the inception of the concept.

Parallel to the “BodyShocker” fiasco were game developers who pursued the eyeballs. The

“graphics arms race” had one sole purpose, to create digitally created content which was indistinguishable from video content. The 3D craze lasted only a few years and was quickly dismissed as a viable solution for video gaming. The wearable screen, or headset, proved to be increasingly immersive. The challenge was still to display life as it appears when filmed, but created with graphics. This was achieved with, “Stroll”. Many thought this game was a fake, a sham, and a con. Only after serious investigation was it proven to be legitimate. Even then, some people could only believe their eyes, and their eyes told them it was real and not graphically created. “Stroll” was truly not a game however, it was a simulation. It was a minute and a half stroll down a street. The first person view simply walked down a street. The player was on rails and could only control the movement of their head which determined what they were looking at. What they were looking at was what blew people’s minds. The street was real, or at least looked real. This “retina display” benchmark was truly something that had to be experienced. The eyes, and subsequently the brain, were unable to distinguish the visual experience of walking toward the exhibit where people would stand in line to experience “Stroll”, from the visual experience of strolling down the artificial street inside the simulation. “Stroll” was, to the eyes, a depiction of reality, or at least reality being filmed. At $20 a turn, some people spent all day waiting in line to go again and again. Some were skeptics, refusing to believe that what they saw was real. Others could sense the historic nature of this event and wanted to be a part of it. With only two travelling exhibits, it was the largest entertainment profit ever made to date. Like other graphical milestones before it, all other realistic games were compared to it. Because the visual accuracy was 100%, no other graphics could be better, so the new challenge was to create better things to represent with the graphics. The next major achievement was the game, “Thriller by Michael Jackson”, in which humans, and humans turned monster, were replicated with 100% visual accuracy.

The 2020s saw the ethics of bioengineering, biomechanical interface, and peripheral/prosthesis cross new frontiers of morality, culture, and sociology as people questioned how much of their humanity was reliant on nature/flesh. Bioengineering remained under the guise of medicine until 2025. Eventually the recreational market and the psychotherapeutic markets overlapped almost completely due to increased legalization of traditional drugs and the exponential increase of designer drugs (both FDA approved and illicit). The artificial limb development research labs began using psychotropic designer drugs to assist the body with communication between the brain and limbs composed of inorganic material. By 2034, sensors and auto-chemical delivery systems are cutting edge technologies that assist in granting hundreds of thousands of people limbs and appendages that “feel” real. This is a miracle because due to the increase in non-conventional war, the proliferation of homemade explosives, and prolific urban warfare, more people lose limbs in 2033 than ever before in human history.

Debate rages as to whether Maxwell Jones’s loss of arm (at the elbow) was intentional or accidental. Regardless of the cause, he is the first person to design, test, and have an arm that is “dual-world”. “Dual-world” is a phrase Maxwell himself coined which means that it exists both virtually and physically at the same time. When linked up to a virtual environment, Maxwell’s hand senses the virtual environment. Every sensation is passed along through nerve circuitry (with the help of psychotropic drugs, tailor made for his DNA) to his brain. When his virtual hand touches grass, he feels the “phantom” grass. By 2034, operations are common among the elite to replace, or upgrade as they see it, their existing limbs for limbs that are “dual-world”. Rumors circulate that some people become addicted to replacements and seek black market operations which seek to replace as much flesh as possible.        

While humanity seeks to implement machine systems into their organic frames, software engineers increasingly look to integrate the observed behavior in organic systems into their software. The golden ratio, the flight pattern of a hummingbird, the swarming nature of ants, structures and patterns of snail DNA, and other natural occurrences are weaved into the code of software. (Crichton) The merging of nature and machine causes new religions to form. These religions focus on the coming of a new messiah, an artificial intelligence which will usher in the age of immortality for the combined machine and human race. These prophets look to the video game industry’s history as a prophetic prediction of events to come. Speaking “prayers” in HTML, wearing buttons from keyboards, and ranking clergy using experience points are some of the eccentric ways in which these religions worship video games and digitization. While human souls yearn for connection to computer systems, computer systems begin to grow souls.

The unbottled soul begins to show up more and more frequently in software that nears true A.I. levels. The video game industry divides itself into two time periods: BS and AS or Before “Stroll” and After “Stroll”. Later in history, somewhere around 2041, not only the video game industry, but all of humanity will divide time into two different periods: BAI and AAI or Before Artificial Intelligence and After Artificial Intelligence. “Stroll” achieved visual simulation, but the characters still had to be scripted and voice acted. The skins were generated but the actors were still flesh based. When graphically created humans were first given artificial intelligence, this disingenuous performance created a disconnect between action and depiction and the illusion of reality was broken. As an increase in random elements and computer controlled elements grew, so did ghost in the machine. (Ghosts) Both random bits of code which coincidentally attached and manifested operations never intended by the engineer and the eery feeling that life was being created by computer generated characters created a sense that something great was on the verge of emerging. In 2034 AI is amazing, not perfect but still impressive. The first great example of this was the game, “Son”. “Son” was a game in which the player assumes the role of a father. The father has an adopted son. This NPC son was a complete AI. Reacting and adjusting to the appearance and parenting of the player, the son grew at an increase rate of thirty times normal. So after 10 days, the infant was 300 days old. Players became extremely attached to their sons, so much that funerals were held when the children died. Others protested the game as it was totally up to the player how they wanted to raise their child. When gameplay videos depicted the homicidal tendencies of sons who were abused people were outraged. The fact that  no “real” people were hurt didn’t matter to anyone but the law. New laws were written to grant the same restrictions on “photorealistic graphics” as there were on video.

The magnetic goals of recreating humanity’s experience for a human being in an artificial setting and creating an artificial humanity strive to meet together to merge man and machine. The gap is not fully closed by 2034 but both sides are within sight of each other. People altering their bodies to venture out of the real and into the virtual is polarized by virtual beings attempted to cross over into the real world. Video games are the new leaders in both simulation and gaming. Gaming, as in sitting down and playing a video game, becomes so similar to a simulation that the world questions where life stops and games begin. (Huizinga)