My Kingdom For A Horse

So I was reading the latest Games For Windows, and it had an article entitled, “Three Wishes.”  The angle was that the magazine asked a number of industry figures what technological trick they might wish for if they had a magic genie.  And what surprised me about the article was just how routine most of their requests were: the industry’s come a long way in the last thirty years, but we’re still dealing with many of the same issues.  Unbelievable cosmic powers, itty-bitty living space, I guess.

For example: Warren Spector wants a game engine that’s as accessible as movie-making equipment (so he doesn’t have to reinvent cameras, AI, the UI, and so on), as does, essentially, Richard Garriott.  Will Wright wants good pathfinding.  Matt Milller of NCsoft would eliminate bugs.  Brad Wardell - the CEO of Stardock - would like to get himself some virtual reality.  Bioware GMs Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk request great AI and better digital actors.  If these seem familiar to you, it’s probably because gamers have been complaining about not having them for years.  Why haven’t we made more progress? 

The cynic in me suggests that this is because game designers want to solve the insoluble - which is a pretty good use for a genie, I suppose.  A universal user interace is nice to imagine, but unless you stop all technological progress in the industry, it’s never going to happen.  Developers have really created that problem on their own - they always want to try to do something a little bigger, a little better, and that expectation has trickled into the market.  And great AI, pathfinding, virtual reality - these are both subjective and incredibly demanding.  No one’s passing a Turing test any time soon. 

Yet at the same time, we’ve made enormous strides in many of these areas.  Pathfinding isn’t perfect, but it’s light years ahead of Dune II.  And AI may not be human but soldiers in Half-Life 2 behave a lot more realistically than an Imp from Doom used to.  Ultimately, I think, this suggests two things: 1) we’re trying to solve problems so complex that even significant progress is a small fraction of the total journey, and that 2) we’re really just hoping to create a pixelated version of reality.