The future of gaming begins with the iPhone, says Charlie Stross

If you've read/devoured books like Singularity Sky and Accelerando, the name Charles Stross will carry significant weight with you - especially when he talks about technological trends of the future.

Yorkshire-born writer, programmer and pharmacist Stross was therefore invited to present a keynote speech at this year's Leaders of the Online Game Industry (LOGIN) conference, in which he looked toward the future of gaming that has already begun with the iPhone.

"The iPhone has garnished a lot of attention. I've got one: how about you?" asks Stross in a transcript of his speech over on his Antipope blog.

"As futurist, SF writer and design guru Bruce Sterling observed, the iPhone is a Swiss army knife of gadgets - it's eating other devices alive. It's eaten my digital camera, phone, MP3 player, personal video player, web browser, ebook reader, street map, and light saber. But the iPhone is only the beginning.

"Add in picoprojectors, universal location and orientation services, and you get the prerequisites for an explosion in augmented reality technologies."

By comparing the iPhone to the consumer high-tech standard of 1984 (the Macintosh 128K), he predicts what sort of device the iPhone is likely to evolve into.

"At its heart is a multicore CPU delivering probably about the same performance as a quad-core Nehalem, but on under one per cent of the power. It'll have several gigabytes of RAM and somewhere between 256Gb and 2Tb of Flash SSD storage. It'll be coupled to a very smart radio chipset. It'll be a GPS and digital terrestrial radio receiver and digital TV receiver as well as doing 802.whatever and whatever 4G standard emerges as victor in the upcoming war for WWAN pre-eminance."

It's not just the technology that Stross sees changing and evolving, though. More importantly, the gamer will be very different. He looks at the current gamer - a 30-something who grew up with Pong, with an Atari 2600, a C64, an Amiga (you and me, basically) - and asks where we'll be in 20 years time.

Will you have given up gaming, just because you're fast approaching 60? Of course not, and Stross doesn't expect you to have. Indeed, he sees a time almost upon us when anyone under the age of 80 will have grown up with video games, and that will create a generation of highly experienced and educated gamers.

The wealth of gaming knowledge behind this core demographic will place enormous demands on game developers to produce only the highest quality titles.

"The median age of players may well be the same as the median age of the general population.," Stross explains. "Sixty year olds have different needs and interests from twitchy-fingered adolescents. For one thing, their eyesight and hand-eye coordination isn't what it used to be. For another, their socialisation is better, and they're a lot more experienced. Oh, and they have lots more money."

Already we can see how discerning middle-aged gamers are, having replaced the teenagers that game designers only recently were targeting - caught somewhat unawares by the
demands of creating for an audience that, often enough, is older and a little bit wiser than they are.

"By [2030], you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings," Stross concludes.

"The codger-gamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than today's gamers.

"They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces - ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes - but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners."

Looking briefly to the present once again, it's perhaps worth noting a few potential landmarks in gaming that just happened courtesy of Charles Stross: He just coined the phrases "codger-gamer" and "meatspace". I suspect these will become a significant part of the digitised English language.