First Person Shizzle
The Voice of the Future
By Dave McLean - August 3rd, 2010
I was thinking about video games the other day (surprise!); specifically, how far we’ve come. I remember playing Flashback on the Sega Genesis for the first time, immediately thinking, “how much better looking can video games get?” Flashback was highly cinematic, the characters looked and moved like real people–I was sure that we had reached some kind of ceiling in video game progress. Well, obviously: wrong. Look at Uncharted 2, Heavy Rain, or Infamous; look at just about any driving game right now—we’re a quantum leap from where we were back in the day.
Now, once again, I’m thinking that games can’t get much better looking than they are today. But I think I might be right this time. Graphics are due to improve, sure, but we’re not going to see the same jump as we did from how things were fifteen years ago. Fifteen years from now, graphics will be better, resolution will be sharper, but the difference won’t exactly be revolutionary.
This got me to thinking: what will be the next big revolutionary development in gaming? Mulling it over, I excluded anything that’s already been announced or released to date (so, scratch off motion devices and 3D). I had two big ideas at first. One was a rumble-enable bodysuit, which would provide one-to-one player/character movement and give appropriate nudges wherever the character got hit. Second was a gaming tent—a reasonably small enclosure you could step into, where the game would be projected in every direction. Cool ideas, I’d love to experience either, but they’re both ridiculous from a price perspective. Expensive as hell to develop, expensive as hell to buy. Maybe someday these could be feasible, but not anytime soon.
Then I had a third idea, and this is where I really believe the next big jump will occur: voice recognition. When I brought the idea up the other day while talking with Jorge, he reminded me that it’s already here. And sure, that’s true: Tom Clancy’s EndWar lets you bark out orders at your team, and Kinect promises voice command capabilities too. But in all current cases, the programming is about as sophisticated as a text based adventure, allowing you to Go North, Punch Ghost, and Eat Sandwich. What I’m suggesting is that voice recognition will evolve to a point where you can have reasonably sophisticated conversations within a game. On the surface, this sounds kind of impossible. Language is so nuanced and varied, there are subtleties and colloquialisms—there would seem to be too many possibilities within a conversation for you to realistically mimic one in a game. But think about Scribblenauts for a second. Scribblenauts lets you summon well over ten thousand different objects within gameplay. Objects interact with the environment, and objects interact with other objects. The result is a mind-boggling number of potential outcomes. There would seem to be too many possibilities for this to really work, but it works very well—and it runs on a handheld, even.
I think this could be huge because it could be cheap, at least for the consumer. There’s no new hardware needed—you don’t need a more sophisticated microphone, it’s just a matter of developing the software. And I think that this kind of voice recognition—the ability to have a real dialogue with other characters—would be best used as an additive; it wouldn’t be a game in and of itself. I wouldn’t want to just walk around and talk to people all day. I’ve played that game: it’s called Real Life—and I hate it. No, think of something like Law of the West from the Commodore 64 days. You walk through town interacting with folks and depending on how you treat them, you either find a friend, score a date, or end up in a shoot out. I think that kind of thing could be done beautifully with an advanced speech-based system. Pack in enough possibilities within each encounter and it doesn’t have to be a very long game from start to finish. Alternately, take a game like Scene It, which could be turned into Act It. You have to perform the dialogue from famous movies, and you’re rated on how close to the original performance you are. Where Rock Band parties used to be big, now you’re getting together with friends to see who does the best Ezekiel 25:17 speech from Pulp Fiction.
Call me crazy, but voice is where I think the next big gaming revolution come from. Disagree? Let me have it.
