Science Fiction Problems: Video Games (Summation 2)

This is the final part of a series, and the second part of the series’ summation. For the other parts, click the following links:

Part I: Video Games as a Part of Culture

Part II: A Brief History of Virtual Reality and its Role in Science Fiction

Part III: Psychological Conditioning in Gaming

Part IV: Mobile Computing and Video Games in Science Fiction

Summation I: Questions to ask yourself while considering the above

Well, here we are at the final pieces of this enormous puzzle. Thanks for being patient with me while I attempt to cover every angle of this topic. I hope this series has been informative and interesting. Next week I’ll have my review of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, as promised, but now, lets take a look at those final two parts, and what we can do with them:

Social Gaming and Psychological Conditioning Through Video Games:

Age demographics by Newzoo - keep in mind that these games tend to appeal to all ages

Nefarious intent or otherwise, using games designed to manipulate its players to act as their creators want… would be attractive to many organizations/governments/corporations. Whether for profit or social engineering, you might want to use psychologically-conditioning  video games in your story. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you figure out how they would fit:

• Significance: We already have Skinner Box-type video games in our own world, so for them to matter (and hence be usable as a plot point) they have to be significant in your story, and different enough to be interesting. First, how significant do you want these games to be in your story? You could do anything from merely describe the daily, gamified tasks of a character as he apathetically works at his work console, making the game only a descriptor of your world, or the games could easily be the entire focus of the plot. Perhaps no one realizes that they are actually being brainwashed by these repetitive, addictive games, and the one who finally understands must find a way to stop the corporation/government who creates them from gaining control of the population through hypnotic suggestion. Try to think of the ends these games could meet, and how they could be abused.
• Prevalence: Tied into this is the degree to which these games permeate your world- is it something of a full-scale epidemic inexplicable and alarming to anyone who analyzes the trend, or simply a localized thing, within certain companies or industries, or even only in specific subsets of the population (more or less how it is in our world). Prevalence would greatly affect the significance of these games in your world- if literally everyone is playing them, that says a lot about your characters and how their minds work.
• Motivation: Finally, who puts out these games, and why? Are they just a product created to sate the appetite of the customers, or are they an instrument of control? Are there laws and regulations to control these games, how they’re made and who’s making them? How do different cultures in your world view these games, or use them?

The Place and Nature of Mobile Technology:

We already have 4G wireless connections to give us an idea of where the technology will go in the future

While this one’s kind of a given in a lot of stories, if you want your technology to feel like it developed naturally from our own, you should take mobile technology into account. Here are some questions to help you use mobile technology in your story:

• Availability: We talked about how this technology would allow people to use powerful computers wherever they want, but just where is “wherever”? We’ve all had to go hunting for a wireless internet hotspot on occasion; do the characters in your world have to do something similar? There are already city-wide wireless connections in our world, are your cities similar? This would be a good way to distinguish between urban and rural areas, of course, but also slums, refugee camps- any place where undesirables gather would likely not have great internet reception. Other than the service itself, who actually has access to these devices? Are they expensive, limited in number, or regulated? A dictatorial government would likely have something to say about its citizens having access to the internet (they do in our world), especially if you have cyberspace in your world. Certainly the sort of self-contained models that do not require a connection would be at a premium in such a world, and would likely be reserved for only the elite and properly licensed agents of the state. Think about how the availability of these mobile devices and the services required to run them would affect or be affected by your world.
• Hackers: There should always be hazards associated with power, even if they go unrecognized. This offers a feeling of balance, and thus allows you, the author, to skew that balance to one side or another in order to create conflict. The same goes for mobile technology, and you should take into consideration what sorts of hazards we already face our day, and how those might translate. One rather obvious example is hackers- people who are skilled in working themselves into the cracks of security and exploiting tricks and loopholes to get a system to give them what they want. In our world, that is often information- financial information to be used to steal funds, or some dirty secrets to be used to gain leverage against someone. More and more today, however, we are seeing Hacktivist (hacker activist) that have some political motivation, using their powers to cause havok for their enemies. Especially if practically anyone can get hold of a powerful mobile device, practically anyone could be a hacker if they had the right skills. It could be that hackers are central to your plot, or you might not want to consider them at all, but you should think about how they would be handled in your world.

• Other Hazards: Depending on how your world is set up, other hazards could be having your data watched by someone you don’t want seeing it. Overbearing governments, corporations, or perhaps a private citizen with the right strings to pull could find a way to gain control of the flow of information. This could be a 1984 “Big Brother” situation, in which any sense of rebellion or dissent is met with harsh consequences, and only a handful of people have the right to free speech, or it could just be that illegal activity is recorded and used as evidence later. If you don’t want this situation, what prevents it? Are there laws, perhaps a certain bill of internet rights that the citizens cling to for protection? Remember that if there is some power left to be exploited, it likely will be unless there are specific actions taken to prevent it.

This concludes my summation, and the series. Don’t worry, I’m going to work on making my posts more stand-alone from now on, minimizing the series. It just so happens I had a lot to say on this topic, but from now on I’ll attempt to spread it out in a more reasonable way instead of dwelling on one subject this long.

Next week I’ll have that review I’ve been promising (I promise). Until then, did I miss anything in my summations? What are some other considerations that I didn’t cover?

Science Fiction Problems: Video Games (The When’s, Why’s, Do’s, and Don’ts) Part IV

This is the third part of a series. To see Part I, click here. To see Part II, click here. To see Part III, click here.

Hello all, it’s that time of the week again, and I’m here with another installment of Science Fiction Problems. I’ve still got a couple things left to say about video games in Science Fiction, but next week will be the last part of this series. I’ve got some new stuff after that , starting with a review of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. This week, I wanted to highlight another aspect of modern video games that I haven’t seen handled in a way that makes sense.

Mobile Games and the Future of Location-Independent Computing

Premise: Pigs steal eggs. Birds retaliate. Entertainment ensues.

Last week I talked about social games and the Skinner Box trick that’s used in many of them, but there’s another similar genre that most people lump together with Farmville and its ilk: mobile games. Games created specifically to be played on a mobile device such as a smartphone or a tablet PC, devices that otherwise have very limited hardware and are incapable of the sort of AAA games available for higher-end laptops and desktop computers. Angry Birds and other puzzle-type games are some of the most known, but a quick look online will return results for a much broader spectrum of games available, including a large number of surprisingly sophisticated ones, many with 3D graphic s and complicated programming that would have been considered current-generation only 7-10 years ago… now on a device that can fit in the palm of your hand.

While we’ve already discussed the Technological Singularity and how it’s not necessarily reasonable to assume that our current rate of development will continue to increase exponentially, within the span of 2 years, we have achieved a growth in the sophistication of mobile games that it took the rest of the video gaming industry 10 years to accomplish. And, the further we go into developing this technology, the more a particular trend becomes clear- the decreasing need for location-based computing, relying on a cumbersome, stationary system on which to play games or use our work-related programs.

Not only that, but there is currently a push for individual game consoles or computers to be done away with entirely. Listening to the news or browsing the internet, you’ve probably come across the term “cloud computing“, which essentially means using a network of computers as if it were one giant one. This method can be used with wireless internet to connect a smaller device normally incapable of a given task to use the cloud to handle it instead- meaning that a mobile device can use the computing power or data storage capacity of a whole group of computers instead of its own, meager hardware. A common example is the ever-useful (and beloved in our particular group) Google Docs. All that information is stored online, with practically no limits to memory, and can be accessed from a smartphone or any other device, without storing the data on the device itself. Go check it out if you haven’t already, its incredibly useful.

So, what does this mean, exactly? Well, right now there are limitations on how much data can be transmitted wirelessly, but after that’s solved, it could mean being able to play high-end games and use hardware-intensive programs on the go, without having to lug around an expensive laptop. This could mean playing the latest video games on your cellphone, or editing high-resolution images or videos, easily, on a mobile device.

What we’re looking at is a future without a limit on what can be done with a mobile device.

How this figures into Science Fiction

OK, so now that I’m done geeking out about mobile technology, we can get down to actually using this stuff. I think many of you have seen a sci-fi movie where the characters are using some kind of arm-mounted computer (usually with a holographic display), but I’m sure you just assumed that the little unit had all the hardware built into it, and it was cheap enough to be widely used. Well, while that would certainly be possible and plausible, it’s more likely that such a computer would use a network like the one I described above. Obviously, you could have such a device and never go into any detail as to how it works, but if you want to add a layer of world-building that will make your world feel more real, here are a few ways you could utilize this emerging technology:

• Differences Between Consumer and Professional Devices: If there are very few expensive parts in the actual computers that the general populace of a culture purchase, the devices will be very affordable and inexpensive. There would likely be a service fee to connect the device to the network, but that wouldn’t be necessary. The only downsides would be that the device would not work as well (or at all) without a network connection, and using a wireless connection could open the door for government monitoring of data and possible hacking.  More expensive devices could contain the hardware, not relying on a network and therefore not be as vulnerable to hacking or connection problems. This could be a way to explain why the elite hacker in your group of characters isn’t nabbed by the evil corporation he constantly harasses, or why a group of activists is constantly found out by a government bent on global dictatorship.
• Saturation of Media and Video Games: With such cheap, powerful devices available, the level of saturation a culture would see of media in all its forms would surpass anything we see today. As I mentioned in the last post, practically anyone could develop games or programs themselves, and depending on the culture, the kinds of media that the populace creates (or are able to create) and consumes would be a great way of characterizing them. With mobile devices, a government could easily censor forms of speech it doesn’t like, but potentially anyone could become an activist in their own right (or, as it were, the protagonist of your story).

As you can see, there are several avenues that have not yet been explored, and several more that can be discovered as we think about what this trend of mobile technology might mean in our future. The fact that such powerful tools could potentially be so widely available means that such a world could be radically different from our own, and the potential dangers and opportunities beg to be written.

Well, that’s all for this week. Next week will be a wrap-up and summation of what we’ve discussed in this series, and a list of questions to ask yourself when building a science fiction world with these ideas in mind. Until then, here’s a great video essay presentation from a small group of video game industry insiders that covers the topic I discussed in a very professional (and amusing) fashion:

Extra Credits: Consoles Are the New Coin-Op

(I tried to embed it, but alas. No youtube links. They’ve done several others, so if you’re at all interested in the video game industry and discussing video games as a medium, they’re all fantastic.)