Three ways to play the future

Leigh Alexander

Games

Endless, unfinished, everywhere: Leigh Alexander hails the cross-platform, off-platform revolution

The earliest video games were born in boxes, bound within the confines of cabinetry first, computers later. Even now, the console is generally what comes to mind when we imagine video games: a thick slab of black resin; a sleek white rectangle.

In the past two or three years, that shape has changed. More: it has blurred . You used to be able to segregate games by genre – "core" games for serious at-home players and "casual" games for drowsy older folks who wanted to click on blocks. Those designations don’t mean much now, thanks to new platforms and new business models that take advantage of smartphones and social networks.

Apple’s iOS helped pave some of the way. Before the iTunes store, pocket-change transactions were a nuisance; these days they’re the norm, and one is as likely to pick up new "episodes" of favourite games like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney as stumble across cool indie titles like Canabalt and Solipskier .

Facebook, meanwhile, has acquired around 800 million active users – a massive user base that developers of games and apps are eager to address and monetise. The games industry knows it’s best to try to reach us where we already are.

Traditional examples of social games have achieved only mixed success. They’ve been driven by metrics, to the exclusion of practically everything else – including design. And pleasure. Still, the sheer number of developers experimenting on the western world’s biggest social network has yielded interesting lessons, while consumers are now used to the idea that games are something they can do absolutely anywhere: on a phone, in a web browser, or on a social network. They’re also inexpensive to sample, and compulsive to explore. A typical offering gives away the basic product for nothing, or next to nothing, and invites consumers to earn or buy further content. Developers, who once concentrated on shipping discrete products, now find themselves engaged in an ongoing, live operation. They’re performing .

This can’t help but affect the traditional experience of gaming – and means the end of paying a retailer $60 for a video game disc with no guarantee that you’re going to enjoy it. Or be able to play it.

Here’s what will happen to games instead:

They won’t end any more.

Video games are increasingly a service, not a software product. Glimmers of how this will look are emerging in massively multiplayer online games. These persistent game worlds are continually expanding and evolving, and are live and online all the time. In the mobile and social gaming space, content updates and evolutions are so frequent, we barely notice them – and so essential, games that don’t update regularly will fail.

Persistence, live operations and continual updates are a method of ensuring that players are engaged – and paying their way. Scratch at the talk of "continuing an immersive narrative" and of "creating virtual words that live forever", and you’ll quickly hit a commercial imperative. Since it’s in everybody’s interest that a lucrative narrative does live forever, this hardly matters. The best way a successful game can reward its fans is by living longer. Games like Noby Noby Boy , Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery and Tiny Tower can be ever-living, continually evolving spaces that feel increasingly real.

Realism has, of course, long been the grail of the home console market, where games have most strongly pursued immersive visual fantasy. Console games are multi-million-dollar universes, rivalling film in how intently they aim for cultural permanence. The downloadable content model, as pioneered on mobile phones and browsers, has become the norm in our homes, too: new "episodes", levels or areas of a world are available for purchase a few months after the title releases.

Still, as online computer games and social games become more sophisticated and prevalent, console game-makers will have to work hard to keep their audiences buying into the medium’s high entry price and steep time demands. Watch for console games to elaborate their linear storylines into multi-stranded narratives, akin to those of an engaging, episodic television series.

Games won’t ever be perfect.

An unpolished console game is disaster. In the browser, social and mobile space, however, there is a growing trend to release the scaffolding of an unfinished product to a curious audience, using their experiences to shape the game’s future. This makes financial sense for developers. Why blow your whole budget on a product you aren’t even sure people will like, when the always-on environment of online gaming gives you instant feedback and the chance to instantly respond?

Let’s say we all keep getting stuck or losing interest at the same point in the game: developers can see what we’re doing, tweak the problem or task that’s causing difficulty, or simply remove it from the game. Our in-game behaviour reveals, better than we can, what we most want to take shape in the game world. Then, even once the mechanics are refined, developers will be constantly creating and adjusting content to maximise our pleasure and engagement. You can already see this taking shape outside the gaming space, where web apps and networked products launch in very limited private beta periods before slowly opening up to new users.

We’ll play games everywhere.

Connectivity is the watchword of the 21st century, and we’ve games to thank for creating the very idea of persistent experiences that can be accessed from wherever we are.

This trend will continue: imagine playing a game with a friend or family member on Facebook, and then continuing the same game from a related smartphone app – with no interruption, and with all your data intact. Later, you switch on your home console and see that the progress you’ve earned is reflected in a deeper, more graphically massive universe.

In the past year or two game developers have been experimenting with launching Facebook and mobile apps that augment or correspond with their boxed or larger downloadable versions, and the connectivity between all these different access points will only improve as games continue to leverage our always-on world. Who knows how relevant discs will be, as cloud computing allows us to store everything we enjoy doing in a remote data cluster we can access with any number of devices? Even apps that aren’t games per se will use the progress trackers and incentives developed in game design, the better to become larger and larger parts of our everyday lives.

The box, in short, is history.