Future Now
The IFTF Blog
On-the-screen games are still part of the future
Amidst all of the excitement about new forms of gaming that take place off the screen (such as on cell phones or through GPS devices), it can be easy to forget that there are still a lot of developments in the world of on-screen games. One particularly exciting area is online gaming, where tens of thousands of people from all over the world will log onto virtual environments at the same time, playing as unique characters--often times not even human--and take on quests or build their online lives.
These games are often referred to by the straightforward name of massively-multiplayer-online-games (MMOGs) and they generally come in two flavors: those that have special themes (fantasy, space, historical) and revolve around fighting battles and completing quests, and those games that more-or-less emulate the real world, where the only goal is much more social and building a parallel life online complete with clothes, objects, houses, and friends.
We consider these online worlds to be as much about the future of pervasive gaming as games that will take place off the screen and in the (sub)urban environment, though what the relationship will look like isn't quite clear. One hypothesis: these games--and the characters, quests, and social relationships therein--will start to be accessible off the computer screen, and may even be dependent on what the players do in their 'real lives' (so going to a certain spot in the real world with your GPS-enabled phone would accomplish something for your character in the game). Many players of MMOGs currently log on for hours a day but they'll multitask, getting things done for other aspects of their lives like work or family. If the term pervasive gaming refers to a future of entertainment that mixes game with real life, people who participate in these online worlds already have some familiarity with living these hybrid lives.
All of this was actually just setup to share some news, a new PriceWaterhouseCoopers projection that subscription revenue for these online worlds (their pricing structure is generally a one-time setup fee and then a small recurring monthly fee, between $10-20) will hit $3.9 billion by 2009, up from $647 million in 2004 and an expected $936 million in 2005.