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The world of online gaming is about to shift into hyper-gear
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Hooked on online games.
THE FUTURE of entertainment for this century is online. Every month, several hundreds of video game enthusiasts take to the Internet for multiplayer games — computer games that pitch one player against another from across the town, or across the globe via the Internet.
Even with the increasing online traffic to play games on the Internet, multiplayer gamers still exist as a segmented group, entwined and enamoured with their escapist worlds, almost like a cult. The generic gamer still plays non-online games on his TV using game machines — PlayStation, GameCube or the Xbox, created by the behemoths of the video game industry, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.
The world of gaming is about to shift into hyper-gear with two new developments. The arrival and proliferation of very high-speed Internet connections to residences worldwide is the primary factor. High-speed connections open up the Internet in ways ordinary connections never can. Very recently, Bangalore became the first city in India to get access to residential-level high speed connections, i.e., broadband. The second factor is that the highly anticipated iterations of the most popular video game platforms, namely Playstation 3 and Xbox 2, which are slated to be released within the next two years, have been especially designed to take advantage of broadband.
This could suddenly set the stage to have all major games being Internet-based, and online games to be the reigning art form of the century, just as movies have been of the last.
Playing video games via broadband opens a world of previously unimaginable possibilities. Primarily, there is the thrill of interacting with strangers as far off as England or Argentina through a video game. Each player would manifest in the game as an "Avatar", a character that you control in the game with your game-controllers. There would be as many Avatars in the game as would be players playing the game. Your Avatar may be as a captain of a squad of soldiers charged with breaking into the game-world of "Scandinapura" to rescue a wounded and captured teammate held deep within the confines of a dungeon in the centre of a fort.
As you are helicopter-dropped at the north-end of the fort in the dead of night, you watch in horror as a two-storey tall "Werhbler", a stealthy dinosaur like creature — only much larger and meaner — pops out of nowhere, and with a terrifying roar, picks up two of your team-mates with its tusks, and dashes them to the ground. Just as you may be a player from India, your teammates may be 20-somethings from England and China; the helicopter folk may be from Pakistan; and the Wehrbler, your cousin Gokul from his living room in USA.
SUNIL THANKAMUSHY
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