Technologies that revolutionized gaming + 5 trends for the future

Raymond Williams was a sociologist and communication theorist who, studying the emergence of television, concluded that such an invention did not occur strictly at the moment when such a device was conceived, but when such a machine began to affect our view of culture as well. This also applies to video games as invention technology, which evolves side by side with society. So, let's take a trip back in time through the Technologies that revolutionized gaming.

A timeline of gaming history

1958: the world's first video game

Tennis for Two is often seen as the video game ground zero for having been the first to bring with him the objective of ludic recreation. Conceived by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA, with the aim of entertaining visitors, it also marks for being the first multiplayer video game, since it was possible to be played by more than one person simultaneously.

However, it is noted that there are two other previous systems that are usually taken into account, but the first of them, from 1948, was a missile radar simulator, while the second, from 1952, emerged with an academic purpose whose objective was to illustrate a thesis of interactivity between humans and computers.

1960s: Network games/online multiplayer

O PLATO (acronym which translates to Programmed Logic for Automatic Educational Operations) was one of the first digital systems to support network communications, bringing with it support for forums, chat rooms and email. Although it was originally produced for educational purposes, it is noted that it became one of the first platforms on which it was possible network play, and Spacewar itself! (see below) came to receive multiplayer support by the system.

1961: Spacewar! and the PDP-1 Computer

O PDP-1 was a powerful computer of the 60s and the platform responsible for running Spacewar! Made by Steve Russell, member of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, Spacewar! gained popularity as a open application which was shared by the club's players and was improved according to usability. From this point of view, he was the true forerunner of the Culture of mods generated by the users themselves, which help in solving problems and expand the gameplay beyond what was conceived by their own creators.

Thus, the PDP-1, as a machine capable of running Spacewar!, is certainly marked in the history of games as one of the technologies that revolutionized electronic games as we know them, since it is an approach of affection for a product that remains to this day.

1971: the first arcade machine

In 1971, immersed in the success of Spacewar! in MIT environments, Nolan Bushnell came to the conclusion that the game Russell created could make a profit. So he built a dedicated device inspired by the success of pinball machines. About one thousand five hundred machines Computer Space were produced, but ended up failing because it was a product that looked and played too intimidating for the audience at the time.

Success came the following year, in 1972, when he (alongside Ted Dabney) founded the Atari and, counting on the talent of a young engineer named Al Acorn, they put on the market the arcade capable of running Pong.

1972: sound card

Gooch Synthetic Woodwind was the first sound card used on computers. However, games with sound were already a reality, such as Computer Space itself, with its own audio system, and Pong, capable of reproducing the noise of the ball.

Other attempts to reproduce audio were music that ran in parallel to the system (as silent movies did) or physical devices capable of reproducing audio, such as the solenoid (an electromagnet capable of reproducing sounds and used intensively in Pinballs). The Atari 2600, from 1977, for example, was already the first console to carry an 8-bit sound card (the Star, produced by Motorola).

1972: First commercial console

O Magnavox Odyssey arrived in 1972 and was originally conceived by Ralph Baer, who thought of using television as a gaming platform. Originally working for an intelligence firm called Sanders Associates, he began putting his idea into practice on his own (and his five hundred employees). When introducing her to his superiors, only one of them ended up being interested, Bill Rusch. Together, they even sold the device they produced to a company called Magnavox.

When launched, the Magnavox Odyssey featured a monochrome display and was not capable of emitting any kind of sound. It ended up being a commercial failure because of the high price (one hundred dollars) and limited marketing.

1973: first color video game

The first game capable of reproducing colors was Color Gotcha!, a limited version (less than one hundred copies produced) of the 1973 arcade Gotcha!, produced by Atari. Other color games reached the consumer market, but the first success marked by such technology was Galaxian, in 1979, that it was a kind of clone of Space Invaders — which was in black and white, but like other games at the time, used analog resources to convey the idea of ​​color through optical illusions.  

1975: the first microprocessor game

In the past, video games were produced on completely dedicated machines whose architecture was entirely conceived in order to run their own titles. Gunfight, from 1975, used the Intel 8080, a third-party programmable microprocessor. The first console to use a microprocessor was the Fairchild Channel F.

1975: analog controllers

The first game to bring a analog controller (able to understand the direction and translate it digitally with inputs in the software) was an obscure 1975 console called 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. Gradually, the system evolved and was able to identify not only the indicated direction, but also the intensity in which that direction is selected (as in Sega's Space Harrier, from 1985). With regard to the analog lever in home controls, a very similar system had already been released in a control for computers (and Mega Drive versions) known as XE-1 AP, 1989, although it was popularized by the Nintendo 64 in 1996.

1976: the first ROM cartridge

The Magnavox Odyssey had several cartridges of its own to play its games. However, such titles were not on the cartridges: they were a kind of “key” for the system to change which of them, already programmed internally, would be played by the machine. The first console to use ROM cartridges, this is, Read Only Memory, was also the Fairchild Channel F, since, now, the games were software that were in the cartridges to be read.

1977: the first portable game

Mattel Auto Race, which at the time was seen more as a toy, today can be seen as the first incursion into portable video games. A little later, Gunpei Yokoi of Nintendo, after watching a salaried worker playing with a calculator on the subway, came up with the idea to produce the Game & Watch. They were the first successes in handheld video games and led to the production of the Game Boy. Today the smartphones can be considered the main mobile platforms, with cell phones being one of the main entertainment interfaces in the world.

1980: the first online service

The first online service — that is, offered by a company — was the PlayCable, from Intellivision. With the use of an adapter, it allowed downloading new games to the devices, using traditional signals for the television itself. It was discontinued in 1984 and is not considered a success because of its high operating cost.

1980: First 3D game

The first game considered as the pioneer in 3D graphics it was the arcade Battlezone. Although vectors are used to bring an impression of depth, it is noted that the movement was still in two dimensions, and vectors were used to bring the impression of depth. Subsequently, the Z axis movement became extremely popular through shooters from the 90's as Doom e Quake.

1981: The first commercial programmable GPU

Previous machines always used their own systems responsible for the graphic reproduction of the devices. Motorola and RCA made great strides in the area, increasing the possibility of resolutions, while Namco produced the Galaxian arcade, capable of reproducing colors in RGB like never before seen.

In 1981, however, there was the launch of NEC µPD7220, the first integrated VLSI graphics processor for PCs alongside the first fully programmable graphics processor, the TMS34010. Speaking strictly of video games, a company called Sharp released the X68000, a home PC capable of reproducing a palette of up to 65.536 colors and support for sprites.

1985: the first game on a CD-ROM

Previously, PC games were very commonly shared on diskette, media that emerged in 1971. CD-ROM, media that, in the past, was the most advanced in terms of storage capacity, appeared in 1985. The first game to use this resource was The Manhole, in 1989, which had already received a floppy disk version a year earlier — a process we now commonly refer to as port. Speaking of consoles, the first to use CDs was the infamous Phillips CD-iIn 1991.

1987: the first cartridges capable of saving progress

Older arcades were not able to save games, but recorded the player's score. PC games also had the ability to rewrite data — especially Text Adventures (text adventures, in free translation), as Zork. The Legend of Zelda, in turn, was the first widely distributed game to use the save system on a console.

In Japan, this was possible because of the Famicon Disk System's RAM system, capable of rewriting itself. As the peripheral had not been released in the West, a technology was used in which an internal battery would be capable of holding progress — and which had already been used in the obscure Japanese RPG called Mirai Shinwa Jarvas, August 1987, two months before the official release of Zelda.

1990: the first video game to use a Memory Card

With the rapid advancement of game technologies capable of producing and reproducing software that were being released, games were becoming increasingly complex and lengthy. Thus, it was soon necessary to create a simpler system capable of storing the progress made by the player in games whose media were read-only (ROMs). Thus, SNK introduced to the world the concept of Memory Card in your Neo Geo AES, being the first home console to use a flash memory to save. Its biggest version, the arcade Neo Geo MVS, it also brought with it the ability to read Memory Cards.

1994: motion capture

The motion capture (motion capture, in free translation) is famous for putting actors in clothes glued with sensors and digitally recording the movement performed by them. The first game to use such technology was Virtua Fighter 2, in 1994, followed by Soul edge, from NAMCO in 1995.

Since then, technology has been used constantly, especially with regard to the implementation of photorealism in the game system, in which the characters are made by renowned actors who lend their appearance to the game. It is also quite common in sports simulators like FIFA and NBA 2K.

1995: Virtual Reality

Os motion sensors and virtual reality they walked side by side, since the next step was to feel “inside” the action promoted by video games. After motion sensor technologies with the Power Glove (see below), Nintendo took a risk with the infamous Virtual Boy, considered one of the company's biggest failures. It was a very heavy device in the form of a display capable of reproducing only the color red.

It is noted that, years before, Sega also tried to develop the technology, but gave up on the project and the few advances were implemented punctually in some of its arcades. The first commercial success in VR is considered the Oculus Rift, of what is now the Meta (formerly Facebook Inc.) — and that even wants to dictate the concept of Metaverse, also related to virtual realities, for the future of gaming technologies.

1997: image capture

In the past, it was extremely complicated to capture video from old computers, as the systems were virtually unable to run their applications while recording the screen and compressing the images in a minimally acceptable way. This was only possible with peripherals considered too expensive for an average user.

Everything changed with the rise of the Pentium II, in 1997, with a 200+ MHz processor capable of processing 240p recordings, which at the time was roughly a quarter of the screen resolution. Over time and the production of low-cost capture cards, the habit of recording the screen itself spread and expanded into a culture of its own. streaming, with games being produced already targeting its online streaming potential, with other people preferring to watch it than play it.

1998: voice recognition

The first video game to receive voice recognition was the Nintendo 64, with its own peripheral called VRU (English acronym for Voice Recognition Unit). So, Hey You, Pikachu! was the first game to use such a feature on the console, in its Japanese release in late 1998.

Afterwards, the award-winning Seaman, from the Dreamcast, hit the market with the title character (voiced by Leonard Nimoy, known for Star Trek) who talked to the player. In both cases, the precariousness of the recognition systems is remarkable, which insisted on not identifying the player's speech. Today, game technologies have evolved to the point where systems such as Alexa, the virtual assistant of Amazon, to be able to run their own titles based only on such an identification feature.

2000: streaming games

O G-Cluster it was one startup Finnish company responsible for designing the technology for cloud gaming, presented in 2000 at E3. Later, further advances in cloud gaming came with Crytek, who wanted to implement it in their FPS, Crysis. The first commercial service of this suit was the OnLive, released in 2010 (and purchased by Sony in 2012).

2003: Digital market on PCs

Half-Life, from 1998, was one of the main games to embrace the culture of modding when it was released, and Valve itself, the company responsible for its development, decided to incorporate several of the modifications made by deeds into the game's base code — as was already the case with Spacewar!, almost half a century earlier. Thus, constant updates were necessary in order to improve the game and prevent the exposure of security flaws found by the players themselves.

Gradually, these mods were sold as games of their own and required new updates. In order to unify all the games that required Valve's attention, it created a single platform capable of converging its entire online network with the Steam. Having hit the market in 2003, it started to receive games cookies over time and became the main “virtual console” for PC gamers, who were able to have control of their library of titles in a single service. Today, it is almost impossible to think of a PC game with a physical release, as Steam has practically eradicated this market mold.

2000: Online multiplayer on consoles

While the implementation of online features has been done before (see PLATO and Playcable), there are two online services that have served to pave the way for today's multiplayer scenes. The Dreamcast, already heading for an early end, bet all its chips on SegaNet, service launched in 2000 in the US (other equivalents were launched earlier in Japan and Europe).

Although SegaNet gave the device a survival, it was not enough to keep it on the market. The Xbox, in turn, came for real with Halo: Combat Evolved, a multiplayer phenomenon that served to show the world the success of Xbox Live (current xbox network).

Such a system helped to consolidate online gaming on home consoles, as other similar services played a key role in the next generation — starring the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. Nintendo's console, for example, despite its popular motion-sensing controller, was badly hurt in the competition due to the lack of robust support for multiplayer online, which even limited the performance of its main titles at the time, such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

2004: touch screens

Touch technologies are not necessarily new, just remember the 90s, when bank ATMs were already using them (even if they didn't work very well). although the Nintendo DS was responsible for bringing only in 2004 a vision considered innovative, which managed to leverage this style of game and served to pave the mobile market until today (with smartphones), Sega was the first to try to use the technology in Sega Graphic Board, a control for the Sega SG-1000, predecessor console of the Master System. The first game to explore touch as a form of control was called Terebi Oekaki.

Note that the never-released successor to the Game Gear, also from Sega, aimed at implementing the system. The first console (albeit educational) to exclusively use the touch system natively was the Sega Pico's touchpad, while the first to have a touch cloth really was the tiger gameOf 1987.

2006: Blu-Ray Disc

O Blu-ray disc is easily one of the most present gaming technologies in the entertainment industry today, and one of the most recent as well. Known primarily because of its implementation on the PlayStation 3, it was developed by Sony (alongside other companies such as Panasonic, Pioneer and Phillips), which entered the competition in a kind of war between physical media that had the intention to replace the DVD. Its main competitor was the HD-DVD, released in the same year, and Blu-Ray managed to consolidate mainly because of its implementation on the console in question.

2006: motion sensors

Although the Wii popularized the concept of motion gaming, the idea has been around for a long time. O "play by movement” came along with arcades, since machines like Heavyweight Champion (1976) and hang on (1985), both from Sega, already required physical movements of the player, even if they were not wireless controls. THE Power glove, from Nintendo, also required similar controls. The first completely wireless sensor able to read the player's movements was the Sega Activator, which used a system called Light Harp and failed due to its low accuracy.

With the overwhelming success of the Wii in its early years, Microsoft and Sony raced to produce something similar for their platforms. While the PlayStation 3 received the PlayStation Move, in the same format as the Wii Remote, the Xbox was marked by the launch of Kinect, which identified the player's entire body and didn't need any controls other than the camera.

2016: 4K resolution

PlayStation 4 Pro was the first console to bring 4K resolution support natively. While it was a mid-gen release, the PS4 Pro was enough to serve as a kind of checkpoint, since its 4.2 teraflops GPU allowed such a feat and served to give a taste of what would come for future generations, when games would be designed from the drawing board to run at such resolution.

2018: Ray Tracing

Ray Tracing it is an ancient process of identifying the directions and intensities of light rays through mathematical formulas in order to understand their physical behavior. Over time, the ambition arose to try to reproduce them digitally. Although the movies — especially the ones from Pixar — had already managed to accomplish this feat, the games took a while to implement the technique due to the difficulties of processing in real time, something that changed with the launch of the platforms NVidia RTX, designed to be natively capable of reproducing the graphic effect in question.

2019: SSDs (Solid State Drives)

PlayStation 5 e Xbox series were the first to bring the technology of SSDs (more specifically from NVMe-like models) natively. While others used internal hard drives, the PS5 and Xbox Series innovated by producing platforms optimized for the technology in order to accelerate processing power, which in practice corresponds to shorter loading times and greater system agility in identifying commands. .

2021: facial recognition

Facial recognition it is not necessarily a new technology. However, a piece of information that has come to the public recently is the fact that the Tencent, the Chinese giant responsible for Fortnite and owner of the Epic Store, will implement the system in its own titles for a very curious reason: it needs to be within the Chinese law that prevented minors from playing between ten at night and eight in the morning or for periods longer than ninety minutes a day.

Although Tencent claims that the system responsible for such inspection comes from the government itself and that the company will not store any user data, it is interesting to think about how the games of the future may also implement this type of technology as a non-censorship measure. , but security, as accounts of certain online games become very valuable due to high amounts spent on microtransactions or because they are work materials of professional eSports players, for example.

5 trends to keep an eye on for the future of gaming

Although new technologies appear in games every day, many of them end up falling into oblivion or, at least, they are in a kind of hibernation state because the current hardware capacity is incapable of providing the intended sensations in the target audience. That is why historical distance is often necessary in order to perceive the real impact of some innovation over the years.

Still, present data often helps us to look ahead, identifying trends that will dictate the next years of the market. So, we separate four trends to keep an eye on the future of games from here.

Graphics that blend in with reality

When considering the single pixel that went from left to right in Tennis for Two, the game industry has made great strides in generating increasingly impressive graphics. Over a period of ten years, in the 80s, we went from 8-bit consoles to 16-bit devices, jumping from just 256 color possibilities to 65.536 shades.

As if that were not enough, in another ten-year leap, the world has evolved from machines capable of reproducing a few polygons on the screen in three-dimensional environments to other systems that are much more powerful, capable of rendering billions of polygons on the screen in real time, as is the system case Ninite, from Unreal Engine 5, which is also only possible because it joins other high-end game technologies, such as SSDs that allow faster loading.

This could be a feat in its own right, but it's important to point out that the complexity of reproducing such graphics has also been greatly facilitated by increasingly user-friendly game engines. Whereas previously it was necessary to program a title completely from scratch (the so-called hard-coding), the consolidation of game engines ready — a movement that, although it already had some previous representatives, was spearheaded by the first Unreal in 1998 — made the development of games something less technical because they were true ready-made packages with resources that facilitated practices whose necessary technique would take years to learn and perfect.

In fact, it is important to take into account that the popularization of engines like Unreal and Unity made it easier for the game industry to reach the level it is today — mainly because both are increasingly advanced engines whose basic features are free, in addition to being much easier to launch a product today than it was fifteen years ago. account of the practicality of platforms such as Steam or even its most recent competitor, the Epic Store, which increases the percentage of profit if the game has been developed using the base Unreal.

There was no point in having the desire to make ultra-realistic games if the game technologies themselves didn't allow them to be put into practice. Today, with the photorealism in vogue and the ease of reproducing movements with motion capture, the future that awaits us is probably the creation of increasingly impressive worlds whose appearance will certainly be confused with the real world.

Machine Learning: Artificial Intelligence capable of learning

Although often linked to works of science fiction, artificial intelligence have been part of our lives for decades, the first of which dates back to Alan Turing, father of computing, who developed an algorithm capable of identifying patterns in chess players and coming up with countermeasures for certain moves — even before he invented what we now call a computer.

In games, the presence of AI is felt since the first interactions in which players needed to beat the machine in some way, as in Pong itself, which would identify the path of the ball to hit it. Artificial intelligence would be defeated when the player managed to create a game situation in which the speed of the bar controlled by the computer could not keep up with that of the pixel that is made of a ball.

Over time, more complex AI applications were being developed at the same pace that games were becoming more complex as well. Precarious forms of AI were often just enemies programmed to repeat pre-programmed patterns without relying on inputs of the players. Soon, there were also processes that can identify player inputs and bring about a pre-programmed behavioral reaction.

What happens is that players soon began to see predictable patterns that made it easier and easier to understand and overcome the challenge. All this was calculated by the developers themselves, who aimed to achieve the constant flow of a title in order to make it challenging and rewarding without falling into the so-called valley of boredom, when the ease is simply not enough to hold the audience.

However, while such AIs are preconceived by designers, the future is looking at self-sustaining challenges with artificial intelligence capable of learning by observing the behavior of players. O Machine Learning (machine learning, in free translation) is precisely a technology that, when implemented, makes the machine manage to understand the trends in vogue of the most competitive titles and be able to replicate them on its own, finding increasingly elaborate solutions and at the limit of what the games themselves allow.

In an era when the eSports are increasingly dominant, this type of technology is expressly important as it serves as yet another training resource among players. In this type of game, AIs need to reproduce the qualities of humans so that they can at least offer a fair learning curve so that it can reach at least the basic level of human opponents. In addition, complex AIs make the worlds generated by games increasingly alive, convincing and believable, increasing the value of immersion.

Although the past of artificial intelligence is basically marked by serving as opposition to players, what can be seen is a kind of collaboration between both parties, since such technologies will help developers to create increasingly complex and exciting experiences for their audience, since it will be possible to identify behavioral trends and offer means for the code itself to be able to deal with the possibilities brought by the inventive mind of the audience.

Game Streaming: streaming to the world

Speak in streaming games generates a kind of ambiguity because it is a term that can bring two different ideas and both are in vogue in order to try to dictate the trend of the future of the games industry.

One of these impressions concerns streaming in the sense of cloud gaming, that is, the possibility of playing a title being played on servers at a distance and which, in fact, only requires interfaces capable of transmitting and receiving its inputs, such as television, cell phones or even computers or consoles, occasionally needing a control (in some cases, not even that).

Although the cloud gaming be one of the main bets of the market for the next years, some obstacles need to be taken into account, especially the need for a high-speed connection. While streams video only send the signal to the end consumer, the gaming one requires constant two-way traffic that requires not only the reproduction of the screen, but also the collection of player inputs and a constant processing of this information.

This can sometimes seem like an overcoming challenge, but it is also important to consider that not all countries in the world have enough infrastructure to be able to accommodate this type of system. Just remember, for example, the niche of fighting games, whose commands required the creation of systems such as rollback in order to take into account the quality of the internet

Still, the cloud gaming today it already has interesting alternatives. even if the Stadia considered a resounding failure because of its rocky launch, some one-off titles released for the Nintendo Switch, unable to run more robust software, had a positive experience. Other examples of similar and promising platforms are the Xcloud, from Microsoft, and the GeForce Now, from NVIDIA, both newcomers to Brazil. Steam itself has also moved around in the area and already has a system of multiplayer remote in which only one of the users is required to have the game in the library to be able to play with other players.

Despite being often correlated, but not necessarily interconnected, it is also important to draw attention to the rise of gaming on demand. In the same way that Netflix offers a huge catalog of movies at a single price, game companies have also started to move with similar initiatives, such as Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Now (not yet available in Brazil).

The other possible interpretation with regard to the streaming of games is the possibility of transmitting the game itself. As much as playing games, people today are interested in watching others play, making comments and expressing their own opinions in real time about a product. It is also a way for games to encourage interaction between peers, something especially leveraged by the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that made humanity have to shut itself up at home and saw on platforms such as Twitch — which even before that was already on the rise — a way of socializing.

Immeasurable profitability with the mobile market

It is interesting to look at the market screen of today and to think that the first incursions of electronic games in portable platforms emerged as simple toys - like the Mattel Auto Race and the Game Watch - to become the next step of electronic recreation entertainment in situations of boredom.

Still, perhaps more important than that is the possibility of interaction that this type of game provides, especially after the launch of pokemon red/blue. It is probably not necessary to explain the success that the brand achieved around the world in the late 90s, but it is always good to remember that one of the reasons for its success was the ability to play anywhere and its original proposal, which was to exchange the little monsters with other people in order to capture them all by registering them in the Pokédex.

With that, it was possible to be literally anywhere with our Game Boy that someone else could approach with the intention of battling or arranging some trade. Much of the title's structure was also conceived in order to promote agile gameplay, which can be started and stopped anywhere, in addition to a proposal collect-a-thon, which even refers to those random toy machines that came in capsules that were acquired by coin-operated machines — so much so that the prototypical name of the franchise was Capsule Monsters.

This spirit of collecting and the feeling of chill in the spine when inserting the coin and waiting for the desired capsule exists to this day and has been completely embraced by the market. screen, completely dominated by Gruel. O mobile gaming, by being unable to immediately reproduce the main AAA releases on the market, has managed to establish itself as a niche, endowed with its individual characteristics that make it evident in the gaming industry today.

It is very easy to produce a game for screen because it usually requires simpler controls — just the touch screen of the smartphones — and the online infrastructure is often tied to Google (in the case of Android) or Apple (iPhone). The advancement of networks such as the current 6G also contributes to the dissemination of this style of game. In addition, the potential for profitability by microtransactions is incredibly high, especially with regard to gruel, since everything can be collected in order to be a true fan of a certain brand.

However, the main differentiator of mobile games is in its audience. Literally anyone with a smartphone today can become a consumer. In 2020, the revenue of the category reached almost ninety billion dollars, according to data compiled by the portal Statista, while the report of the Electronic Software Association indicates that 57% of the players use the smartphone as at least one of its platforms — outperforming PC at 42% and consoles at 46%. The reach of smartphone it is also reflected in age groups, dominating as the main platform among players aged 35 to 64, with casual games (such as titles whose session is easy to start and stop) dominate this vein.

Therefore, the potential of the market screen, although questioned by many self-styled media hardcore, is seen with very zealous eyes by the industry that knows that the real money is there. After all, it is a democratic platform in the sense that it is easily accessible to all types of consumers, covering genders and ages with a unique breadth, especially in the much-talked-about era of convergence (see below).

Convergence Culture: What is Metaverse?

Metaverse is a word that came into vogue with the announcement of the new name and proposal of Meta, formerly Facebook Inc. Despite this, this concept is far from being a novelty and for decades the concept of a second reality, parallel and digital, has already been discussed – whether in fiction or academically.

Star Trek, for example, already brought concepts of artificial realities with the insertion of the holodeck, a fictional environment in which several narratives could be lived in a secondary environment and created digitally. William Gibson, in turn, brought another similar concept at ground zero of cyberpunk literature, neuromancer, where the virtual environment and the physical world merge into a single reality.

The proposal was also discussed academically, with thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, bringing concepts such as the global village, which brought an idea in which the evolution of media (the means) allowed the whole world to connect with a proximity in the same way as primitive villages of the past, where all the inhabitants knew each other and had easy access to each other.

In games, the concepts of metaverse have always been very present here and there, especially with the intensification of online games, especially MMO's, where new worlds existed and players could take on other roles that, in a way, represented a facet of themselves as they played. Another aspect that led to the dissemination of these environments is the way in which the endemic marketing started to take part in this kind of situation. World of Warcraft, for example, was one of the main names in this area, as brands began to take advantage of it to carry out actions within the game itself.

One more point to take into account is the feasibility of virtual realities. While the Virtual Boy was a landmark, it was by no means a successful foray into this area, as other arcades have tried to do the same. Much of this is due to the fact that the current game technologies of their times were not yet ready enough to provide a believable experience.

With the advancement of graphic quality that today is capable of reproducing envying three-dimensional environments, this proposal of immersion in the metaverses manages to develop with better property. For some time now, games have managed to promote incredible recreations of places that manage to transcend space and time, as is the case with how the series Assassin's Creed accomplished the feat of bringing virtual environments such as Renaissance Italy, France during the French Revolution or industrial England in the XNUMXth century into modern times.

Bringing the feet to the ground, metaverses can reproduce our contemporaneity. Although limited in its time, the Second Life attracted a lot of attention for bringing its proposal to have a secondary life in a completely digital way, being necessary to pay attention to the application's own phenomena, such as its own economy.

Games, then, because of their ease with virtual environments, become ideal platforms for metaverses in a process that communication theory calls convergence culture. Neutral position games such as Fortnite, could be platforms for marketing endemic, very interesting because it manages to bring together a very different variety of ideas (often contradictory, capable of uniting Marvel and DC under the same game, for example) that players will certainly buy because they are immersed.

A Augmented Reality it is also yet another Metaverse turning point. Pokémon Go was one of the main examples of the resource's success. Although often confused with just the camera feature "projecting" the Pokémon in the environment, augmented reality concerns the very use of Google maps when generating the Pokémon appearing randomly in our path, as it uses an aspect of the world physical and augments it with the elements of the title in question.

More than ever, virtual environments will be explored to the fullest. Real-world brands will also be in the games. An avatar and a username will be as important as our appearance and our real names. Also, everything will be connected to a virtual level, where actions performed in a game will be connected to other digital networks not related to the game. Such convergence is a completely digital and metaphysical process. This only reinforces that, although game technologies often depend on advanced processing and hardware, such evolution is linked precisely to the imaginative capacity of the human being, in a constant process of intellectual evolution.

See also:

The concept of Metaverse goes far beyond games. DISCOVER MORE on the subject and understand how it promises to revolutionize the digital interaction we know today.

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