A post from 2020

A little explanation. Shane Richmond dropped me a note last week to say that he plans to run a series of posts by the people who appeared in his "essential journalism posts", on the theme of "a post from 2020", looking back over the twelve and a bit years in (what I am interpreting) is supposed to be a Googlezon-esque look at the future of digital media. Or, I gather, pretty much whatever we like. Sounds like a fun idea, so here goes...

I can't believe it's almost twelve years since, on what I clearly recall was very little more than the merest whim, I chose to join the red team instead of the blue. If I'd known then what I know now...well, I might have given the decision just a lot more thought.

It must have been around the middle of 2008 when Microsoft, following on the from the 2006 announcement of Live Anywhere and the convergence of its existing gaming assets with the PSP technology it had acquired that year from a struggling Sony, announced that it had signed deals with the remnants of the telcos (and more importantly the wireless ISP providers that were well on their way to replacing them) to provide a live, mobile, always-on, multi-device gaming platform across Europe and North America.

In retrospect most of us digital media watchers had always tended  to underestimate the importance of games in the media mix. According to some surveys one in four adults already regarded video games as their primary entertainment. Casual gaming - the little flash games that were designed to waste a few minutes at lunch and ended up eating whole days - had brought gaming out of the preserve of hardcore, serious players and made it universal. Fully immersive games like World of Warcraft had millions of players and were months away from reaching the tens of millions tipping point; huge numbers of Everquest players, as early as 2004, were claiming semi-seriously to "live" in the gameworld Norrath and only visit Earth; Halo 3's opening weekend had outsold any movie, and its characters had been fully incorporated into the popular culture in the form of user-generated machinima; and the most sophisticated of the multiplayer games had already begun to declare themselves emerging nations, hire economists and operate as essentially independent virtual worlds.

So Microsoft's announcement that it had finished building a game platform that would unite the PC, PSP, Xbox and mobile phone, that could be played anywhere, would be always-on, and most importantly would synchronise with the very early version of Microsoft's Virtual Earth that was available at the time, should probably have struck more of us as a significant moment for the development of digital entertainment.

This was not just a game, or even a game platform: this was a gaming experience that through Virtual Earth perfectly overlaid the real world, could be played from anywhere for the price of a handheld device (that almost immediately fell in price to zero - I remember the queues!), that let players interact with one another and with artificially intelligent game agents in real time. All of the elements had been available individually for a number of years. There was almost nothing actually new about the technology involved: the innovation, as of course it turned out, was all in the coordination.

So - perhaps because there seemed to be nothing really new about the technology itself - for the first few days most of us  thought it was just the announcement of another game and to try it out, I signed up to the new platform via what was then the MSN website and when prompted to pick a side more or less arbitrarily opted for red.

I've already said it once, but really, it bears repeating. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have put a lot more thought into that decision.

Comments

[BiddexExp23]

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Andrew Gubert