The Futurist Blog has a 3-year report card analyzing his 6 year predictions for home entertainment by the year 2012.
The trends are: improving video game graphics, HDTVs at commodity prices, speech and motion recognition as control technologies, people migrating from television to gaming, some people earning money through games.
None of these trends is particularly surprising. Anyone who plays video games is intimately familiar with these trends. They are entirely mainstream. The catch is that to predict these trends several years before-hand is quite a feat. I think it is safe to say the home entertainment market and underlying technologies have reached the knee in the curve of exponential growth. We will not only see the trends listed above continue to grow and expand but new technologies emerge and combine in different ways.
The Futurist author describes machinima movies as another trend looming on the horizon awaiting creative, technologically sophisticated users to create them.
At the risk of being presumptuous, let me add a few of my own predictions.
Massively multiplayer games will spread beyond the realm of World of Warcraft (and others like it) and the Sims, to a wider selection and variety of games. As broadband connections make the technological connections possible and interesting game dynamics emerge from hundreds and thousands of interacting virtual people attracting more people, this prediction is not even that far fetched.
The social networking technologies (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) will begin to link user profiles in the real world with user profiles in the gaming world so that people will be offered another way to expand their social circle.
Those are the only two predictions on my mind at the moment. Sorry to disappoint. Read more blogs from The Futurist for better predictions and more detail.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
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