Bruce Sterling recently gave the keynote address at the Game Developers Conference in Austin, Texas, on the subject of computer games thirty five years from now. It’s fairly long, and here’s a summary of a few of the more concrete bits:
Computers in 2043 are dull commodity items, this one looks like a small towel. Computer games in 2043 change reality, rather than being self-enclosed worlds looked at on a screen — hang up the towel and look through it and you see the world differently.
Game designers in 2043 have seventy years’ worth of computer game history to draw upon.
A powerful computer is made up of many tiny units, like grains of salt, with quantum computing power, each grain with the power of an entire server farm.
Who has become rich because of the success of multiplayer online games? Bankers. Entertainers can get rich but can’t manage money so don’t stay rich. “So, guys who want to make a lot of money go into the areas of games where people make money. And they’re not game players. They are bankers.” “The gaming bankers ARE the normal bankers. In 2043 there isn’t any other kind. The old kind are all extinct.” The people who make the games just provide the world in which other people, bankers, get rich.
The end of the talk is a more general rallying cry to be distruptive and “live every hour”. (Via Infovore.)