I'm one of those people who like's their games nice and saturated with some good characterization and plot. Snappy, sophisticated dialogue, long lasting impact, and leaves you sitting there mesmerized. Essentially playable movies in a sense.
Minecraft and the Sims do not do this for me. They're not my types of games, and don't really have elements that I find enjoyable for long periods. But hey, just because I have an opinion doesn't mean the games have no value.
-Generating worlds is much less a hassle now. You know that movie James Cameron made using blue cat people in place of Native Americans? Something about a kid who could control the elements too I think, but anyway, that movie had some serious natural features and landscape to be built, and you really can't bang that stuff out in a small time frame. Enter the technology behind Minecraft, in which the game generates a randomized environment for you to explore. Features like rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, grasslands, all there in a randomized fashion. Granted the basic information like what trees look like and how physics work is programmed in, you've got a world. They basically did that with Avatar. But hard mode, with lots of hand designed trees, but the end result followed the same principle, and well, the audiences bought it.
-Large crowd generators. Let's be real here, who is gonna be able to motion capture 300 odd people at once in spandex and dots on their faces all doing some odd thing? Yeah it's not gonna happen. So we have game engine techniques to push us forward. With this method, you can generate a mass of characters and give them simple collective AI controls. You have the crowd taken care of, and the main guys focused on. Cool deal!
-Virtual reality is useful for once! Working with computer generated stuff is great and all, and makes production far easier, but what about the actors who have to deal with things that aren't there. How do you react to a object or organism that you know isn't real? Virtual reality can help with that. The Oclulus Rift, a device you wear on your eyes, brings the fictional into reality. That terrifying monster you were pretending back away from? Well now you've got a bit more encouragement with it being in front of your eyes.
Considering how movie-like video games have started to become, I'm not all too surprised we've started adopting ideas from the medium into making movies. Motion capture alone is used highly with both movies and games, so that says a lot about where we may be headed in the future. I think the barrier might merge at some point.
The thing is, more technology doesn't exactly mean better output. Sometimes it is better to stick to older techniques and harder methods for a more appealing final product, but hopefully we'll take our usage of upcoming tech in some moderation. Hopefully.
Really though, how much further do we go before the line between movies and video games has been totally blurred? It looks like it won't be too long.
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