Watch Out: Next-Gen Games Will Follow You

LOS ANGELES -- In the future, interactive games will be everywhere--and everyone is going to want to play.

They won't require a PC or a TV. Games will follow and immerse you, running on whatever is the latest mobile technology--from personal digital assistants and phones to pagers and whatever is next.

And hardcore gamers won't be the only ones at play. Yesterday's Atari-playing kids are growing up, and gaming is going mainstream as they decide it's okay for adults to play games--and their kids adopt the same principles.

This is the somewhat strained consensus of a panel of gaming industry analysts and executives at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) here this week as they debate the future--and ubiquity--of interactive gaming.

They forecast a maturing gaming industry that will become as big and powerful as today's film industry. And as with the best movies, technology won't be what makes the best games great--their content will.

Games Grow Up

"The kids bathed in bits are growing up," says Chris Melissinos, a business development manager at Sun Microsystems. "Adults didn't just start playing games; kids grew up."

But designers need to create games that cater to the way adults live, says Neil Young, vice president of Electronic Arts. Grown-ups don't have hours upon hours to play and master games like they did when they were kids, he says.

Young and his company hope to revolutionize the way adults play games with the upcoming Majestic interactive game. It incorporates phone calls and faxes along with e-mail and other screen time to fully immerse players in the game, while not requiring them to devote 20 hours a week to playing.

Panel members agree that they expect Majestic to be a major milestone in gaming that could impact future games. Several also say that they do not expect the groundbreaking game to be a financial success.

Tracing Gaming's Evolution

Forward-looking games like Majestic should help move gaming further along the human evolutionary scale, says Jason Bell, senior vice president of publishing at Infogrames. Today's games generally deal with just a handful of human conditions such as fear, awe, and aggression. Not much else is covered, such as spirituality, and that should change as the industry evolves, he says.

Few of today's games actually touch people emotionally, agrees Celia Pearce, a research associate for interactive multimedia in the Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern California.

"Most games are about themselves," she says. Notable exceptions, such as Myst or the Sim series, focus on life and spirituality, and people connect with that. More games need to follow those trailblazers, she notes.

Watch for games to evolve into ongoing processes, instead of something you play once and discard, suggests EA's Young. He points to television as an example of entertainment served in 30-minute packets for easy consumption.

"We must be respectful of the time people have," he says. Successful games in the future will use several types of technologies to make entertainment more engrossing and more fun, he suggests. People may spend a few minutes on the train, a few minutes before a meeting, then maybe 30 minutes at the PC once a week to play.

Games must shake their reputation as an immature and unproductive pastime, Pearce notes.

"It's often looked down upon," she says.

Sun's Melissinos agrees. People are rarely chastised for reading books, but game players continue to receive grief for playing in their spare time, he notes. He expects that to change as developers create games that appeal to those doubters.

"Everybody is a game player," he says. "They just have to find the right content."