Quote:Original post by think_different
Soon we'll have consoles with keyboards and mice as additional peripherals.

Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 currently support a wide variety of peripherals, including keyboards and mice. (The PS3 supports pretty much arbitrary USB devices.)

Quote:We'll browse the web.

The PS3 and Wii provide general web browsing functionality (PS3 more so than Wii).

Quote:We'll check e-mail.

If you have web browsing...

Basically, the "future" you describe is here. PCs are becoming appliances - most people don't care to assemble their own machines, or order specific parts configurations, and we'll see even less of that in the future if the new requirements configuration schema being pushed by MS/Intel etc comes to pass.



This conversation as a whole would be a lot more interesting if there wasn't a laughable amount of homerism - PC gamers finding any obscure reason to discredit consoles, and console gamers taking off-aim potshots at PCs. Fanboy, please.

"PC gaming" is "gaming" - the distribution or product mix is changing, with an increased emphasis on casual games that every computer can play (including more web-based games, or Flash and Java desktop games). Games requiring superlative rigs are a niche as far as the PC market as a whole is concerned, but it's large enough (due to the overall size of the PC market) to merit comparisons with console gaming - for now.

"Console gaming" is "gaming," too - like PC gaming, it's expanding in all directions to cover more genres. We're seeing the case where users can pick whichever experience they feel is better for them, PC or console for the same game. This is a Good Thing™! Gaming is maturing, moving from an obscure specialty activity into a fully mainstream consumer behavior. These changes we're seeing are merely a consequence of that.

Neither PC nor console gaming is going anywhere soon. fin.

Quote:Original post by think_different
I think the future I'm envisioning is still 5-10 years in the future. We still use PCs for everyday tasks. We don't write term papers on a 42' HDTV, and we don't file taxes online with our PS3 (although we could). I'm just asking, why not?

Because the form factor is not ideal. When you want to do detail work, you prefer to sit at a desk and focus on the material up close. When you want to review work, or share it with others, or engage in leisure, you are more likely to want to sit back.

Say at some point in the future our computers become so powerful that they are effectively pervasive throughout our homes and offices. We will still have multiple visual interfaces, because each one is best suited to a particular subset of the tasks we'd like to use the computer for. Even more interesting, we will have additional interfaces that are audio only, doing away with video because it's a distraction. Imagine being able to dictate your grocery list to the computer while you're looking in the fridge and pantry, as opposed to writing it down and then transferring to a digital form, or entering it directly into a handheld.

With respect to gaming, the "up-close" interface is more of an individualistic environment, where the gamer may be interacting with others online, but is physically alone. Games that do better in that environment will tend to be more detailed-oriented, depending on very fine motor control or fine-tuned dispatch macros. The "at-a-distance" interface is generally more social, able to involve multiple people in the same physical location, but also able to extend online. The games will generally not be as detail intensive as the up-close ones, but may be the same game with a slightly more augmented control scheme (think of the criticisms of console FPS controls vs PC mouselook).

There are no hard and fast boundaries. As illustrated above, both approaches are theoretically possible on the same machine (even today: attach your PC to a 52-inch tv and grab an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows and you might as well be a console gamer; plug a keyboard and mouse into your PS3 - or an Eye Toy for your Eye of Judgment sessions - and you might as well be a PC gamer). This is what makes the debate so pointless. People are arguing mere modes.

Quote:Original post by think_different
Do you think that our preferred modes are going to change? Will future generations prefer to do their homework on a large HDTV?

Yes, but most likely because the nature of homework will change. Available commodity-level technology informs the mode of instruction, and consequently the type of assigned work. Before the advent of the electronic calculator, students were given slide rule exercises. After the calculator, there was an initial resistance as teachers felt it compromised student ability to compute basic sums independently. Today, however, the programmable electronic graphic calculator is commonplace, and generally embraced by educators.

Prevalence of powerful home computers with sophisticated input mechanisms will change the type of homework assigned and the nature of the deliverable, too, just as the contemporary workstation PC has seen the demise of hand-written essays and papers, for the most part, replaced with word processed and printed editions. Kids in the future will probably receive assignments in more multimedia driven format - the instructor will narrate in voiceover while visual examples of the problem sets are presented, with particular aspects highlighted at appropriate times. The nature of the deliverable may also shift from, say, a printed page to a video presentation ("Ask your parents' assistance!") or even an interactive experience (Click-and-Play, Game Maker, etc may be the predecessors of the "multimedia processors" of tomorrow).

Quote:That seems unusual today, but we've grown so accustomed to using a PC for detail oriented tasks and using larger viewings for more laid back activities. Is this just human nature, or is it a byproduct of the way we grew up?

It's actually an intrinsic. The field of study surrounding this is called Ergonomics. Certain activities are more pleasurable/comfortable/sustainable in certain positions. Consequently, products designed to facilitate those activities must be usable in those positions. It is possible to drive a car standing up, but long ago engineers hit on the fact that the feet are more useful if they are not also bearing the load of the body. Ever since, auto designers and manufacturers have worked to make car seats both more comfortable and more functional.

Turning back to video screens, what happens when we discard the actual screen? What if your computer of the future only requires a surface to project against, so that it can scale according to the distance of the surface you select? (It'd switch to higher resolutions for surfaces further away.) Let's take it even a step further: what if we perfect holographic displays, so that your computer can create a display of arbitrary size in mid-air? Then the same device can scale from a personal view to one you share with hundreds of people. Yet you'd still pick whichever size felt comfortable for a given job. Trying to edit a musical score at auditorium-level projection would be inconvenient - at best you'd keep your score in a small corner of the display area and focus on that... in which case you might as well just downsize the whole display, right?

The future of electronic equipment design will be heavily influenced by ergonomics and fundamental form factors. The limitations of technology have forced us into a few suboptimal solutions, and we've built other solutions on top of those solutions. When the base restrictions are lifted, however, then the whole stack changes in very interesting ways.

(And now they realize why Oluseyi decided he'd go to study Industrial Design... [smile])

Quote:
Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 currently support a wide variety of peripherals, including keyboards and mice

Where can I get a mouse and keyboard for the 360? I thought they wouldn't be allowing mice and keyboards due to the way it would screw up the balance in online FPSs. The only ones I've seen take the mouse input and emulate 360 controller output. Doesn't work very well. If you have a link I'd be interested as I hate playing FPSs with the sticks.

Also, of course PC gaming is going to be dying or shifting in the direction of pay to play. Piracy is obviously out of control and all users have objected to the hardware DRM solutions. The platform is completely open so anyone is free to circumvent the hardware DRM stuff anyways. I would say the quicker the PC gaming world dies the better for developers. I doubt it will happen in a long long time though. Does anyone have any stats on the total number of units sold per platform per year? I think that type of chart, if reliable, could answer this question once and for all.

2 pages of posts when the ideal response to the OP could have been summed up as:

"If yer wud'da shipped on Steam then yer wuddun' be in the s*** with yer Crysis sales now wudd'ya..?"

Quote:Original post by asp_
Piracy is obviously out of control

See now I question that. MMO's can't be pirated, all these big games being released have a very important multiplayer component that uses online CD keys, and then when a single player game does come out it's riddled with DRM or just gets released on Steam.

I haven’t met a person in years who pirated a PC game, as opposed to the days when everything was single player and you couldn't walk into a friends house without swimming through a sea of blank cds. With such a heavy emphasis on multiplayer gameplay these days, something that you need to purchase the game for, is piracy really as bad as developers say it is or is it just a convenient excuse when a game doesn’t sell?

BitTorrent is one of the largest sources of traffic on the internet. I'm willing to bet most of that material is pirated material.

Quote:
See now I question that. MMO's can't be pirated,

And we ask why people keep posting about making their MMO :)

Quote:
I haven’t met a person in years who pirated a PC game

Probably has more to do with you and your friends growing up and actually being able to afford it. I've never met anyone who's paid for a game besides MMO's and FPS's, all tied into online game play. If that's what will remain of the PC market then good riddance.

The best example I can think of is Stardock who seem to be doing alright even with very little protection. But maybe they would have done much better if piracy would have been lower and maybe they could create higher budget titles and drive more innovation in the AAA arena instead? Read sites like digg.com whenever piracy is discussed in the context of another large title being hit hard and you'll see what the current generation thinks of piracy. Everyone knows that every single pirated copy isn't a lost sale but we all also know that a certain percentage are lost sales.

Quote:Original post by boolean
MMO's can't be pirated, all these big games being released have a very important multiplayer component that uses online CD keys, and then when a single player game does come out it's riddled with DRM or just gets released on Steam.

I haven’t met a person in years who pirated a PC game, as opposed to the days when everything was single player and you couldn't walk into a friends house without swimming through a sea of blank cds. With such a heavy emphasis on multiplayer gameplay these days, something that you need to purchase the game for, is piracy really as bad as developers say it is or is it just a convenient excuse when a game doesn’t sell?

MMO's can be emulated. DRM and Steam are more after to stop Joe Average from lending a copy to his friend rather than stopping the big pirate groups, which just isn't feasible (as both Steam and multiple DRM's have been cracked).

As _asp stated, I think the reason why you don't know people who have pirated games lately is because of the people you associate with. Now, piracy has always existed, but with technology increasing and the world becoming more connected, as well as the audience increasing in size, it's appearing more rampant, although I wouldn't say it was out of control (at least in the countries that the games are suppose to be released in). But according to Tom's Hardware,

Quote:
We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys.

It received 1000x attempts to pirate the game than the copies it sold (less than 40,000). Now, granted, each attempt wasn't a different person, but realistically, you're looking at over a million people who tried to pirate it.

My solution to curb piracy? Stop marketing games to males between the ages of 14-25.