Videogame industry overview (panel session): technology, markets, content, future

Abstract

Description While innovative (but secretive) early on, the videogame industry is now rejoining the computer graphics mainstream. In production, we see a rapid move from 2D to 3D animation, lowend to high-end production technologies, limited in-house tools to cutting-edge animation production techniques such as motion capture and 3D character animation. In game formats, we see experimentation with multi-player games, cooperative strategies, and virtual reality. Interactive entertainment overall is a rapidly expanding area with a great requirement for creative intervention and sophisticated computer graphics. The videogame industry has only very recently come into focus for many people in the computer graphics field, yet this industry is now driving much of the technology development in computer animation. Videogame development is being drawn deeper into the media mainstream. We have entered the age of the "commercial transmedia supersystem" where entertainment content is proliferated across multiple marketing opportunities: the game, the movie, the music CD, the book, the doll. Application developers have recently focused on an "author once, deploy many" imperative for cost effective production. As a new generation tackles the problem of interactive content production, their tools apply contemporary technical solutions to a process done with graph paper and assembler code not so many years ago. Videogame content may evolve as well, driven by the new delivery systems which underly market growth. For example, the corporate dreams of interactive television list the two largest consumer revenue areas as shopping and (then) games. Ubiquitous interactive television would certainly leverage today's limited multi-user games. New audiences means designing for new cognitive models of fun and taking advantage of recent research in how media products relate to gender and childhood development. Electronic gaming could evolve to encompass nationwide social events such as elections, celebrity trials, virtual participation in natural disasters, and so forth. All these new products, applications, and markets require technical, design, and artistic contributions for development, yet our skills, knowledge sets, and innovation must be translated into the new forms. To make this translation we must develop a coherent picture of how this industry is currently constituted and how it may evolve in the future. This panel will focus on a number of topics including platform hardware, delivery systems and their markets, the move into 3D computer graphics, virtuality in videogame design, overlapping areas of interactive entertainment, e.g. multimedia and theme parks, markets and content, and projected future developments.