As he delivered the 2012 DICE conference keynote, Skyrim creator Todd Howard said he sees games "as the ultimate combination of art and technology." It's true. No other art form more tightly ties technology to its innovations and storytelling techniques.
With a new generation of video game consoles upon us, a booming world of innovation in tablet and mobile games, and PC gaming more robust than it's ever been, the future of the technology and game art is nothing short of exhilarating.
See also: 20 Hot Games for the Holidays
So what technologies are developers experimenting with today that give us a glimpse of future gaming innovation?
Some of these examples are audacious, so much so we can't be sure they'll ever actually go anywhere. Others are surefire hits for the next decade of gaming.
Image: Oculus VR
Since the 1980s, science fiction authors and geeks have dreamed of a future in which we all play games with virtual reality headsets.
Oculus Rift seeks to make that dream a reality, as many before have tried to do. It was funded on Kickstarter, and went on to impress tech pundits and reviewers as the best effort yet.
It's easy to write off — "No one ever wants to look goofy, wearing a giant VR headset while he games in the living room." But here's some food for thought: Doom creator and actual rocket scientist John Carmack just left the game software company he founded more than 20 years ago to serve full-time as Oculus VR's chief technical officer.
Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani
The Xbox One's Kinect voice command navigation sure feels like the future.
Even the Kinect's Xbox 360 predecessor was impressive, particularly the full-body motion controls made possible by its 3D camera. We haven't seen much in the way of motion controls on the Xbox One yet, but the new Kinect is even more powerful than the last.
Sony’s console offers many of the same features with the PlayStation Camera, but it’s not as powerful as the Xbox One’s improved model.
The Xbox One's entire user interface is built around voice commands, and they feel amazing. It's too bad they only work about 80% of the time. That precludes any hardcore gaming applications, but you feel this should be the future of user interfaces — and it might just be.
It's already happened on PC and mobile: You download games; you don't buy them at the store anymore. Yet consoles still lag behind. Why?
There are socioeconomic factors at play, but it's as much a culture gap. Console gamers have spent years collecting discs and special edition artwork or toys with their games. And don't forget the established culture of game lending among friends.
When Microsoft announced the Xbox One would require an online connection to facilitate digital games, live updates and cloud computing, console gamers backlashed vigorously.
PC gamers already went through this turbulent transition when Valve Software's Steam platform launched in 2004. At first they resisted the change, but the benefits and convenience of digital distribution for both consumer and publisher became too obvious to ignore, when the right infrastructure was finally in place. The same switch is inevitable on consoles; it just might take awhile.
It reminds us of a wise William Gibson quote: "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."
Image: Nirak, Flickr
The sky, as it were, is the limit with this technology. Nothing offers more longterm promise for the future of gaming than cloud computing. It's not 100% about the graphics; that will still be accomplished best on a local machine in the immediate future. Rather, it's about connecting players with each other, with the developers and with the dynamic game world they're inhabiting.
Imagine a game world in which players leave hints for you at every turn, as in 2011's Dark Souls. Or picture fellow gamers dropping in and out of your game seamlessly, blending in with the crowd of non-player characters on the simulated streets of Chicago, as in next year's Watch Dogs.
With cloud technology, game developers could push live updates and events into your game world in seamless real time. They could even carry the load of some non-urgent, non-visual calculations, allowing your Xbox One or PlayStation 4 to dedicate more brainpower to making things prettier.
There are other uses, too. Sony acquired Gaikai, a service that streamed entire games like interactive YouTube videos, in 2012 for $380 million. We later learned Sony plans to use Gaikai's technology to offer old games from past PlayStation platforms on the PS4 by streaming them, handling all the graphics on Sony's servers.
As long as consumers adopt faster and faster broadband Internet connections in the coming years, this tech shows a lot of promise.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Image: Samuel Axon