Video Lecture Series on the U.S. Computer Game Industry: Industry Needs & Expectations--I

• future games
• future game play experiences and interfaces
• future game play venues

• multi-core processors
• camera-based devices

Future casual games

• not addressing existing parlor, board, card, or legacy arcade games
• focused on frequent, short-duration game play (up to 30 minutes)
• games accessed or downloaded from the Web or corporate portal server (or via promotional storage package)
• Yahoo! Games 
• organized by game genre
• community services for game genres
• more women in the 18-45 age group playing, compared to males of all ages
• DinoQuest Online (Science Learning Games at the Discovery Science Center, Santa Ana, CA)
• targeted to 5-12 age group in family play situation
• collaborative problem-solving (usually led by young players)
• focused on supporting "informal science education" consistent with California Science Education standards for 5-12 age group
  
• 13 casual games organized into multi-hour (3-5 hour) play-learning experience
  
• corporate games for job/task training
• corporate games for consumer education on new products/services, government/public programs, health, and others
  
• adver-gaming--games as advertisements for other products/services
• corporate games and adver-games may require U.S. marketing partners

Future mobile games

• not addressing existing parlor, board, card, or legacy arcade games
• 4 billion cell phones expected in use world-wide by 2010
• More than 2000 distinct cell phone hardware packages
• What is the best target for mobile game development?
• Cell phones have very short product life cycle compared to Web, PCs, and game consoles
  
• Many incompatible phone hardware and software packages
  
• focused on frequent, short-duration game play sessions (1-15 minutes with asynchronous or aperiodic interactions)
• phone-based games anticipated
• geo-referenced games and geographic maps anticipated
  
• games that incorporate GPS, Web, and phone-based services provide mixed reality experiences
  
• games accessed or downloaded from the Web or corporate portal server (or via promotional storage package)
  
• adver-gaming--games as advertisements or promotional tie-ins to phone services
• corporate games and adver-games may require U.S. marketing partners
• little/no mobile ecommerce capabilities in the U.S.

Future PC/online games and MMOGs

• largest area of market focus due to very large numbers of PCs 
• PC games may be more/less complex to develop compared to current console games
• superset of casual and mobile game
• market segmented by game genres (action versus real-time strategy versus role-playing game versus simulated world, etc.)
• continuing emphasis on visual/graphic realism, game play physics, spatialized multi-channel audio, higher speed networking, etc.
• games that exploit multiple dedicated function add-in processing cards or multiple processor cores anticipated
• new types of game engines anticipated
• Chemistry, biology, and sociology game engines that enable increasing game-play realism anticipated
  
• games that utilize multiple (up to three or more) displays anticipated
• exploits continual reduction in existing display costs versus increased single display resolution
• easy way to create more immersive game play experience (or field of view) at reasonable cost 
• can be amortized across multiple games
• MMOGs not as technically sophisticated or resource-intensive as PC/online games

Future game-based virtual worlds (GVWs)

• Similar to "casual MMOGs"

• basis for Web 3.0 concepts, techniques, and tools
• basis for Web 3.0 web sites
• personal or corporate game level/map as Web site

• Whyville.net (already supporting >2.5M users, predominantly girls in the 12-17 age group)
• Nicktropolis (MTV+Nickolodeon investing $100M during 2007-2009 into GVWs for 8-14 age players)
• Virtual Laguna Beach  (MTV investing $500M during 2007-2009 into Games and GVWs)
• Virtual Magic Kingdom  (Disney)
• Second Life
• IBM
• Sun
• many other corporate efforts underway!       

Future casual game play experiences and interfaces

• game play as training or education
• Web browser-based user interfaces (including plug-in components or helper applications, as embedded scripting)

Future mobile game play experiences and interfaces

• mostly casual gaming near term
• mixed reality game play in real-world and online anticipated
• user interfaces to remain bandwidth and display limited

Future PC/online game and MMOG play experiences and interfaces

• PC games that enable play to continue across networks and devices anticipated
• PC-to-cell phone-to-Web-to-MMOG-to-GVW anticipated
• PC/online games and MMOGs that incorporate content creation or modification as a core game play mechanism anticipated
• MMOGs not as technically sophisticated or resource-intensive as PC/online games

Future GVW play experiences and interfaces

• similar to casual games combined with Web navigation ("Web surfing")
• incorporation of content creation or modification as a core experience mechanism anticipated
• not as technically sophisticated or resource-intensive as PC/online games

Future game play venues

• Current venues (home, arcades, Internet cafes, PC Baang)
• Corporate (training) workplaces
• Outdoor or urban situated game play venues anticipated
• Location-specific game play venues (shopping malls, theme parks, outdoor stadium or motorsports facility)
• Schools
• Libraries
  
• Cinemas
• Concert halls 
• Sports stadiums
• Broadcast studios

New game technologies

• multi-core processors
• not expected to impact casual games
• mobile game platforms will evolve to incorporate more functionally dedicated processor cores that increasingly mimic current PC platforms (with CPU, GPU, audio processor, network processor, etc.)
• 4-8 processor cores for low-power mobile devices anticipated
• 8-128 processing cores per PC (including MMOG and GVW PCs) anticipated
• homogeneous versus heterogeneous versus mixed processing architectures
• concurrency alternatives (from coarse-grain to fine-grain)
• agent (programmer control)
• task/transaction (programmer control)
• thread (programmer control, compiler detection and allocation)
• data parallelism (signal processing device drivers)
  
• PC/online game and MMOG software functionality distributed across cores:
• PC/online game play dynamics (user interactions, display management, repository management and data decompression)
• numerical simulation (collison detection, inverse kinematics, and other game physics)
• non-player characters and in-game bots (artificial intelligence)
  
• rendering/shading (graphics)
• audio (decoding multi-channel spatialization and speech chat)
• networking (secure data communications)
• PC/online game functionality coordination and scheduling (game "operating system")
  
• all functionality affected by interactions between up to 10,000 in-game objects, each object interacting with up to 10 other objects
• MMOGs and GVWs not as technically sophisticated or resource-intensive as PC/online games on client-side
• Most MMOG server infrastructure and some GVW server infrastructure exploitation of multi-core processors highly anticipated
• Requires game server architecture and implementation that exploit various concurrency alternatives
• GVW servers likely to exploit different architectural choices compared to MMOG servers
  
• video/cameras and audio recording, playback, mixing and remixing
• likely to appear across all types of game platforms
• may leverage partnerships with video/audio social networking and content distribution services (YouTube, Joost, Aleric) 
• incorporating video/audio capture and upload to remote service providers anticipated
• remote services to provide value-added computational processing of uploaded game content for user-directed sharing or redistribution
• Relationship to social networking Web sites or online communities
• via partnership with established portal service provider (Cyworld, MySpace, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL)
• social networking service APIs (application program interfaces) that support user-created games and user-modified games that are integrated with social networking services
• game-based "virtual dating"
• record, replay, share, or modify virtual dates online