Get real - gaming in the real world

You’ve been framed

What so many arguments about games addiction fail to recognise, however, is that PC and console games are no more visually realistic than a photograph. They are still a 2D representation of 3D space using the tricks of perspective developed since the Renaissance. Most importantly, the gaming reality is bound by the same limitation – a square frame. Their interactivity makes them more engrossing than your average photo, but all it takes to escape the game world is to look past the side of your TV screen or PC monitor.

Also, although the very best graphics engines these days are really starting to render images which look like photos of the Real World, as soon as things start to move they don’t exactly behave like reality. New developments like the Physics Processing Unit are a step in the right direction, but here again the action is focused on a clearly delimited screen, a window on the 3D world.

The other area where games fall far short of reality is in the way the characters behave, and this is not going to be enhanced so easily with an extra peripheral adapter such as the PhysX. However, in March 2005 Israeli firm AIseek announced it was developing a hardware AI co-processor called the AIS-1. This will allegedly provide hardware support for four aspects of gaming artificial intelligence. The first is path finding, or calculating the best strategy for moving from point to point. The second is terrain analysis, and the third making groups of sprites coordinate their efforts more effectively. Finally, the AIS-1 will enhance sensory simulation, making the reaction to sensory stimulation more realistic. AIseek has stated that it will be announcing more details, with a possible release date, later in 2006.

MMORPGs get round the AI problem by having real humans play many of the roles, although not usually the monsters. There’s no reason why you couldn’t play a dragon in a World of Warcraft-style game, although few titles have this option. The world would still be seen through the window of a screen, however. This factor will change if and when head-mounted 3D displays become widely popular. But despite all the talk of virtual reality in the 1990s, a screen-based approach to gaming reality remains the norm. This is a representation system with a centuries-long tradition, and most people know the difference between a picture and the real world.