Lunchtime Discussion: One Wish

For the last discussion of this week following up on last week’s Develop Conference I want to ask one simple question. It was the final question asked to the panel of Ben Hebb, the Art Director at Zoe Mode, John Nash, the Studio Design Director at Blitz, and Neil Thompson, the Studio Art Director at Bizarre Creations and a very simple one. If you had one wish for the future of gaming what would it be?

To be honest I’m going to keep this discussion short and sweet, because there isn’t a huge amount for me to say, I want to know what you have to say on the topic. All three members of the panel agreed that they wanted more acceptance of gaming. Each wanted slightly different kinds of acceptance, but in general they just wanted acceptance of gaming, and I’d have to agree with them on that.

Neil Thompson wanted more acceptance of gaming by the government, something that seems to be slowly coming the industries way. In particular with a wealth of new, younger MPs coming in at the general election maybe we’ll see this acceptance from the government. Hopefully the new intake of politicians ‘get’ gaming on at least some level, and we’ll see a real acceptance of the industry as a ‘real’ business in the next few years.

Ben Hebb asked for acceptance of social gaming as ‘proper’ games by the industry and gamers alike. I think he’ll certainly get his wish in the next few years, with social games and gaming exploding ‘core’ gamers will be vastly outnumbered and probably already are. It won’t be a question of social gaming needing to get acceptance, in all likelyhood it’ll be the exact opposite.

Finally John Nash just wanted to have everyone playing games. I think this is as likely as Ben Hebb’s wish, and may be something we’ll see within the next twenty years. Last year Lorcan reported that this was pretty much already true over in Japan. This is the wish I’d like to see come true the most and if I have to make my wish narrower than just acceptance of gaming this would be it.

I want to walk down the street and see people playing on their phone or their DS or device of choice. I want home consoles to be as pervasive as DVD players. I want to be able to strike up a conversation with a random stranger about games, in the same way I can with TV shows or movies.

So let’s ask again, what’s your one wish for the future of gaming? All I ask of you is that you think big.