T w e n t y S i d e d

I have the March 2001 issue of PC Gamer here. In shuffling around old magazines this one caught my eye. I took a peek because it had the 2000 game-of-the-year awards, but then I noticed something even more interesting: An article on the future of gaming that looks back five years to 1996 and then forward five years to 2006. Some of the predictions are amusing in retrospect.

It’s pretty unfair to pick on articles like this. Nothing looks as dated as yesterday’s future, and articles like this are easy targets for derision. But that’s what makes them fun.

So let’s get started!

Prediction: CPU’s will have speeds of around 10GHz.

They give themselves some wiggle-room with this one by saying “in the next five to ten years”. That’s a LOT of wiggle room, and in the world of computers any prediction with that much variance is almost useless.

Prediction: By 2006 we will have real-time PC graphics that exceed the quality we are seeing in movies today.

Toy Story and Final Fantasy movie are cited, as in: By 2006 PC Games will look better than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

You must be joking. Even in 2001, this was clearly preposterous. In fact, in the last five years, the look of those sorts of movies hasn’t seen that much improvement. The newest Final Fantasy movie doesn’t look any better than the one from five years ago.

At any rate, the person who made this prediction clearly didn’t understand the scope of the problem. Twice as much CPU power does not translate into images that are twice as realistic. Not by a long shot. Even if they did: Those movies were made by huge render farms with many, many dedicated computers working together and still producing the movie footage at rates far below real-time. Sometimes as slow as a frame or so an hour. I don’t care how you run the numbers or look at Moore’s law, there was no way you were getting that much power on the desktop in just five years. I’ll make a counter-prediction and say that given another five years, we still won’t have enough power on the desktop for a single computer to render one of those movies in realtime, much less something even better, as the article predicts.

The problem is that each layer of realisim takes far more power than the last. In the last five years we’ve only gotten one of many needed improvements in this area. As of Doom 3, we finally have unified, real-time dynamic lighting. That means you can now have a scene with any number of freely moveable lights that can all cast shadows. This is a big step. Up until now, shadows had to be pre-computed. The level designer needed to run a program to calculate all of the shadows, which would then remain fixed in place. You could move a light, but it was pointless since the shadows cast by that light wouldn’t move. Now that new Doom engine can do this, I’m sure other engines will follow.

But that is one step of dozens, and it was the easiest one. Some other challenges:

• Curved reflective surfaces, like a reflective chrome ball. We can make stuff look like chrome in games, but true bending reflective surfaces that can reflect one another in realtime are still a good ways beyond our reach.
• Widespread use of semi-reflective surfaces. Odds are you are sitting at a desk, and you probably don’t think of it as particularly shiny, but if you look at it from the right angle you’ll see it does reflect the lights in the room. It’s a very blurry and cloudy mirror. Most stuff is. This is really expensive to render, and has only a small impact on the overall look of an object, but if you’re working on realistic worlds you need this. The lack of reflection is one of the things that make PC graphics look fake, like everything is made of dull plastic. You’re not getting anywhere near fixing this in 5 years.
• Refraction: Notice how distorted things look when looking through a bottle. Doom and Half-Life 2 both fake this pretty well, but the movies have the real thing, which is far more expensive CPU-wise.
• Extreme detail: A problem in games that you don’t have in the movies is that the viewer can move the camera around. In a movie, if you plan a shot that is tight in on a penny and then pulls back to reveal the inside of a bank valut, then you can make one perfect, realistic penny and the rest of the scene can be lower detail. In a computer game, the entire scene has to have the that same level of detail or it won’t look right. The user might not take a close look at that penny. They might look at the stack of money on the other side of the room, or they might examine the lightswitch. Or they might glance in the room and leave without a second look, wasting all your hard work and attention to detail.

Conclusion: This problem is bigger than most people realize. We’re sort of at a point where you need double the processing power to make an image that’s 10% better.

Prediction: Sound will extend beyond the 5.1 surround sound specs to 10.2 and beyond.

Short rebuttal: Bwah ha!

Long version:

Most computers still come with a pair of speakers that have the power and fidelity of the average speakerphone. Some people put money into nice speakers, but this isn’t a technological problem, it’s a practical one: Who has the space to properly arrange and connect a dozen speakers? Almost nobody. Where they heck would you put them all? Your apartment would be a deathtrap of tripwires.

Prediction: Genre-specific [input] devices will continue to emerge.

The SideWinder Strategic Commander is cited as an example. Hands up! Who has ever seen or held one of these? Anyone?

Again, this isn’t a technological problem (which could have been overcome by now) it’s a practical one. Even if it were possible to make a game input device that was better than the ‘ol keyboard / mouse combo for FPS and RTS, who wants a half-dozen input devices laying around? even if they were all wireless, the clutter would be maddening. Lots of people have a gamepad or joystick handy, but usually they have one. Who could want a controller just for real-time strategy and another just for FPS and still another just for driving games and another just for flying and another just for platformers? Oh yeah: Don’t forget you still need the original mouse and keyboard on top of all the stuff.

It’s hard enough running the wires we have already.

Prediction: Broadband will make action experience accesible to the masses.

This one comes from Cliff Bleszinski, and I think he’s right on. For those that got it, it did.

Then someone else suggests that this might not be a good thing, because, “Online games might turn into chatrooms for adolescents.”

Two for two!

Prediction: A bunch of various facts about handhelds, cell phones, and portable games.

This stuff was pretty reasonable. They turned out wrong in a few places, but this was a really tough call to make. Proliferation of handhelds was just getting started in 2001 and it’s always tough to see where something like that might go. They make a few funny predictions like having Quake III Arena on a cell phone, but even that wasn’t that wild of a guess in 2001. Nobody was sure what was going to happen, which is why we ended up with the tacophone N-Gage.

In fact, we do have handhelds that can pull off Quake III Arena-level graphics. The Nintendo DS and PSP both look great and can rival the visuals of a PC. They aren’t phones, but they are quite portable. Handheld technology has come a long way – much farther than PC gaming in general – since 2001. Even now I would hesitate to predict what sort of PDA / Camera / Game System / Cell Phone / MP3 Player combos we will see in the next couple of years.

They also make some predictions about handheld wireless online gaming, sort of like everquest on a PSP. I imagine there is indeed a market for this, although this presents some interesting challenges. Battery life is the biggest problem I see here, since you are, in effect, playing your PSP and “talking” on the cellphone the entire time you play the game. That is a battery-killer for sure.

This article was fun to read again after all these years. Another thing I note about this issue: 2000 was a killer year for games. The Sims. Deus Ex. No One Lives Forever. Quake III Arena. Diablo II. The Longest Journey. Combat Mission. C&C: Red Alert 2.

That was an incredible year in PC gaming. I currently own or played almost everything on that list. Some of them (like C&C) have been forgotten, but seveal of those games are absolute classics. Despite the better graphics of today, I don’t have any games on my radar that excite me the way the games of 2000 did. In fact, I’m currently playing Final Fantasy X for the Playstation 2, which also came out in 2000. I might pick up Oblivion once it drops in price or I can get it used, but I’m in no hurry. Nothing on the shelves right now has really captured my interest, despite the fact that I have a new computer and a new video card. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I strongly suspect that gaming is suffering from a little stagnation.

UPDATE: Just as I’m posting this, I notice that Steven Den Beste has a must-read post about the difficulty of predicting future technologies and trends.

Also noteworthy: Mark has this post on technology trends and measuring the rate of technological change.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.