The Gaming Decade

Videogames have now existed for over 30 years but have, in large part remained a phe­nom­e­non sit­ting on the edge of our society. But all the signs are here for the twenty-teens to be the decade of gaming.

Expand­ing the audience

A few years ago, Nin­tendo took a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent approach to what had been done in the con­sole game world. His­tor­i­cally, the trend had been to games that used more pow­er­ful video proces­sors to increase the level of real­ism in games aimed at the smaller por­tion of the pub­lic called “gamers,” a seg­ment mostly com­prised of men between the age of 15 and 35. With Sony and Microsoft hav­ing taken the high ground in those proces­sor bat­tle, it looked like Nin­tendo was in seri­ous trouble.

But, with the release of the Wii, and its motion-sentitive con­troller, the Wii became a sys­tem that was aimed at a more phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of gam­ing, engag­ing the whole body. Nin­tendo also opted for a more car­toon­ish treat­ment when it came to char­ac­ters in their games. Between those two deci­sions, Nin­tendo ended up mov­ing games into a mar­ket that hadn’t pre­vi­ously been addressed. All of a sud­den, it became cooler for the whole fam­ily to play together.

The suc­cess of the Wii in expand­ing the over­all gamer audi­ence left its com­peti­tors won­der­ing how they too could enter that mar­ket. Sony recently unveiled the Playsta­tion Move con­troller, which is essen­tially a copy of the approach Nin­tendo has taken with the Wii.

Microsoft, on the other hand, looked at the model and decided to com­pletely do away with the idea of a phys­i­cal con­troller and unveiled Kinect, a sys­tem that com­bines video cam­eras, infrared cam­eras, robot­ics, and infrared sen­sors to let peo­ple use their body as the con­troller. It’s a pretty rad­i­cal move in that any­one can now oper­ate those games, remov­ing one bar­rier to get­ting involved in that space.

Get­ting Social

The games that have been included as part of the Kinect launch also allow for mul­ti­ple play­ers to get involved at the same time, cre­ate a space that is more social as a result, in a way rem­i­nis­cent of board games in ear­lier times. As a result, videogames will prob­a­bly get more inte­grated to a greater extent in fam­i­lies’ lives.

But social and gam­ing is not purely lim­ited to the liv­ing room. In fact, social games are now one of the biggest trend, with Zynga being the leader in deliv­er­ing offer­ings that com­bine games with a dose of social­iza­tion and a dash of com­pet­i­tive spirit. In only 3 years, the com­pany has estab­lished a num­ber of gam­ing fran­chises that are now being played by over 60 mil­lion peo­ple on a daily basis.

But most inter­est­ing in the social gam­ing phe­nom­e­non is the fact that the major­ity of social gamers do not fill the tra­di­tional pro­file of gamers: a sur­vey ear­lier this year showed that the aver­age social player is a 43-year-old woman.

Game Cul­ture

Between the trends sur­round­ing social gam­ing and the new impact that game con­soles may have, com­bined with the increased num­ber of peo­ple who are play­ing games on mobile phones, it seems we now need to rede­fine the demo­graphic pro­file of gamers.

I would ven­ture, for exam­ple, that the pro­file of gamer is now com­pletely diluted into the pro­file of most peo­ple. The suc­cess of Rock­band has already shown that music and the gam­ing space have now merged suc­cess­fully to cre­ate a new kind of enter­tain­ment that has given new­found life to older musi­cal tal­ent. The launch of the Bea­t­les edi­tion of Rock­band last year was such a cul­tural mile­stone that it even war­ranted its own New York Times Mag­a­zine cover arti­cle.

And the big movie hit of sum­mer 2010 was Incep­tion, a movie that used lingo like lev­els, chal­lenges, and play­ers as part of its nar­ra­tive. In doing so, the movie may have been the first block­buster to fully lever­age game cul­ture with­out being based on a game.

I’d ven­ture that this past sum­mer was actu­ally a turn­ing point in the accep­tance of games as a legit­i­mate form of enter­tain­ment. With it, the whole of our cul­ture is now in the process of shift­ing to sup­port of games as a legit­i­mate enter­tain­ment form, to take their place along­side books, music, and movies.

Gam­i­fi­ca­tion

With the con­sumer space hav­ing turn its level of accep­tance up when it comes to gam­ing, I believe that it is only a ques­tion of time before the enter­prise space gets inter­ested. Today, there are already large num­bers of com­pa­nies start­ing to pro­mote the con­cept of gam­i­fi­ca­tion, or adding game-like ele­ments to dif­fer­ent sys­tems, in order to improve the user expe­ri­ence of those systems.

In the next year, the noise around that space is guar­an­teed to get much higher and I sus­pect that every cor­po­ra­tion in Amer­ica will have a bud­get item for lever­age game mechan­ics in some of their offer­ings. I sus­pect that a lot of those items will not make the final cut of a lot of bud­get nego­ti­at­ing rounds in 2011. How­ever, come 2012, those projects will start get­ting funded in sub­stan­tial ways.

Con­clu­sion

With the con­sumer space already dom­i­nated, and the enter­prise space to soon start get­ting inter­ested, games are going to be a pretty big con­cept in the next decade. Along the way, we will see many com­pany try to build new busi­nesses around those con­cepts and, while many will fail, I sus­pect that the next Ama­zon, Google, or Face­book, will emerge from the gam­ing world.