Video games have come a long way since the first one that was invented back in the 1940s. The gaming industry has had its fair share of booms and crashes, and developers have always strived to make the games as close to reality as possible, yet in a fantastical setting. If you look at the games like Gran Turismo 5 or Call of Duty MW 3, it becomes quite apparent that games today are closer to reality like never before. So, where do we go from here? What comes after video games that look just like the real thing? The answer might lie in a very (graphically) subtle game that has just been launched called TweetLand.
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TweetLand
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TweetLand is a game developed by Tree Interactive and WHY Ideas. A six member team has come up with a revolutionary game that literally plays with reality. Confused? Don’t be and don’t worry, it won’t make you delusional. It simply means that the game is based on events that take place in the real world. The attempt was to make a game that goes beyond the realm of social games and induces a sense of reality in the virtual world.
You can either race on the most dangerous highway on the web, Route 140, or enter Lovecity where love and hate literally face off and here is how it works. In Route 140, you race on the route 140 and the tweets sent in by Twitter users affect your gameplay, the game feeds in the information it receives from tweets and converts them into visual scenarios in the game. For example, if someone tweeted about a natural calamity like an earthquake, expect TweetLand to go into jitters and cause havoc in the virtual world. If someone tweets about an accident, watch out for it.
Lovecity is a beat ‘em up game where you benefit by hate tweets and have to kill citizens who would come to hug you. Every time someone tweets about hate, your ammo goes up and you can spawn any weapon from BFGs (big effing guns) to lightsabers. And unleash hell. This could be the beginning of a revolution in the gaming industry where the content is not pre-planned but random, and the virtual environment is decided by the real world.
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User generated games
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There are very few games that are user generated these days. But that is the way of the future. Wouldn’t you love a game that evolves constantly and never ends? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could create your own environments and weapons and share them with fellow gamers? Games like Minecraft and Terraria are a couple of examples of such games. Here you can create your own weapons or build entire castles where you can invite your friends to come and stay, do trade, fight monsters in the night, and a hoard of other things. And the random world generator only makes things more interesting.
This is just a start but games now are slowly coming out from behind closed doors to out in the open where not only the publishers but gamers as well will have a hand in the design and gameplay.
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Redefining MMOGs
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Online gaming is a rage today, there’s nothing like competing with thousands of fellow gamers from all over the world at the same time and the most popular MMORPG of our time, World of Warcraft, is a great example of that. Real time gaming could redefine how we look at video games, which includes multiplayer gaming and especially MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. Multiplayer games today no matter how vast, work on rigid platforms. WoW (World of Warcraft), for example, is a boxed game with parallel worlds running simultaneously. Now imagine if those parallel running worlds could be merged into one never ending gaming universe.
A virtual world that is flexible and gives gamers an option to create their characters and abilities rather than choose them. The PS3 game, Little Big Planet or LBP as it is popularly called, is a great example of that where you can create your own Sackperson (characters) and sharing is a core element of the game. This will not only be an innovative way to game online but also save the game developers the hassle of updating the content every six months or so.
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Social aspect
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Video games are no more single player. Every game today has a social side in the name of multiplayer. Even Mass Effect 3 has gone multiplayer, which it never had till now. Social networking has become an integral part of gaming. Some are purely digital like Call of Duty Elite where you can have your own war room and discuss strategies. Then you can engage in a team deathmatch after your tactical meeting is done. StarCraft, however, takes this one step even further. They have something called BarCraft where StarCraft fans can meet in bars and see their favorite competitors slug it out in a series of tournaments.
All the technicalities aside, wouldn’t it just be plain cool if our real world affected our virtual gaming world in a hyperreal sort of way.
Images by, Evilhayama, Juan Pablo Olmo, and pop culture geek
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