Credit: Pixabay
To truly assess the technological changes we’ve made in the past 20 years, all we have to do is look at how gaming has evolved to see how far we have come. We’ve moved past arcade games, to single player consoles, to console gaming with anyone around the world, to online PC gaming with anyone, anywhere – including those who don’t even exist, from the virtual world. But where next for the future of live gaming?
Many detractors of anything live critique the “lag” factor that can sometimes require a lot of time to wait for things to load. Increasingly, we want to be using our mobiles to game in small, easy chunks of gameplay – according to Trent Oster, business development exec at Beamdog – something that might not be attainable with the way long, live games are designed. That being said, the amount of time we spend mobile gaming, according to a Statista report, has increased from 46 minutes in 2011 to 258 minutes in 2017 – showing that when we do get into a game, we really get into it.
Games such as Call of Duty harnessed the power of live streaming action from one person to another in short sharp bursts with campaigns that allowed players to dip in and dip out of the servers. Call of Duty recently announced how it was harnessing the power of virtual reality to bring players into the future. Virtual reality is the final frontier of gameplay – the fourth wall that needs to be broken to truly encapsulate the living, breathing world the game occupies.
Credit: Owlchemy Labs via Facebook.
But it’s not just shoot-em-ups that can harness the future of live gaming – the engrossing live streaming element and the in-your-face virtual reality atmosphere. Minecraft, the ever-popular brick-world survival and supremacy game features a live version for Xbox, allowing players to connect with other players around the world.
It’s not just fantasy that is being mimicked in live VR. By taking the casino table out of the casino and onto our screens, providing the same immersive experience, a new host of people can be introduced to the fun side of gaming, without having to go to a casino. Read on here to discover how the likes of HD webcams, RFID chips and special software has helped live roulette make progress into the land of virtual reality,
From the fantastical to the more mundane: Job Simulator allows players to be the artificial intelligence that will replace human jobs by 2050 (according to the game) – all in virtual reality. Euro Truck Simulator 2 allows players to be truckers in virtual reality – for those who have always wanted a have a go at trucking down the expansive European autobahn system.
It seems that the future of live gaming, bringing together the elements of virtual reality we will see increasingly more often, has only just been breached. With talk of nanotech VR being not too far away – which would allow the human body to break into the virtual world – as the Virtual Reality Society report here indicates, the scope for virtual reality live gaming is seemingly endless.
