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Small, incremental improvements don't make shockwaves like the old massive tech leaps used to.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Idk, I'd say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I'd say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I'd say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I'd guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it'd probably look a bit like a square root curve.
I do think that there's an (understandably, don't get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don't really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there've been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There's, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there's very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
Having a direct brain interface game, that's realistic enough to overcome the Uncanny Valley, would destroy peoples lives. People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They'd end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one. Shit, give me a universe wherein I can double-jump, fly, or communicate with animals, and I'd have a hard time returning to this version.
We could probably get close with a haptic feedback suit, a mechanism that allows you to run/jump in any direction, and a VR headset, but there would always be something tethering you to reality. But a direct brain to machine interaction would have none of that, it would essentially be hijacking our own electrical neural network to run simulations. Much like Humans trying to play Doom on literally everything. It would be as amazing as it was destructive, finally realizing the warnings from so many parents before its time: "that thing'll fry your brain."
Have you considered making the real world better?
Tbf, it's kinda bullshit that we can't double jump IRL. Double jumping just feels right, like it's something we should be able to do.
Yeah, no, it'd likely be really awful for us. I mean, can you imagine what porn would be like on that? That's a fermi paradox solution right there. I could see the tech having a lot of really great applications, too, like training simulations for example, but the video game use case is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.