The Science-Fictional Future of the Gaming Industry
Here are my own thoughts on the nutty, far-out future of gaming; things that would make the 40th Anniversary of roleplaying games not just an extension of current trends (whether positive or negative), but a fundamental shift in the way things are done.
This is not conventional wisdom. It's certainly not conventional in the sense that it was part of the convention panel discussion at So Cal, or in the sense that anyone else shares these opinions. Nor is it wisdom. If you'd asked me in 1994, I would have predicted that these things would have arrived by 2004. The fact that they didn't, and I'm still predicting 'em, should give you some cause for skepticism. But I'll go on believing in these until they become true, because it's more fun that way.
OK, here's my list of new developments that could completely transform roleplaying:
Smart Paper. The ultimate book: buy it once, and download an infinite variety of content onto its pages. Smart paper is full of tiny micropores, each one containing a two-sided magnetic element that can be flipped to black or white. Choose what you want to read and it appears on the page. Smart paper -- or any other electronic-media reader that offered the convenience, portability, and ease of use of a book -- would eliminate the awkward and costly aspects of publishing that involve cutting down trees, bleaching and staining their pulp with toxic inks, shipping the result around the world, storing it in warehouses, etc. On the one hand, the profit margin of publishing would be much higher, which would be good for everyone. On the other hand, issues of unathorized reproduction would become more troublesome: a traditional book is a reasonably effective copy-protection device, since it takes a printing press to make a copy that has all the advantages of the source.
3-D Lithography. Want a new figure or terrain element for your miniatures game? Pour some gunk into your 3-D lithography printer and a minute later it spits out the shape you request, still warm from the lasers. Units like this exist now for making industrial prototype, and I'm still waiting for the day they become as cheap as home laser printers. This is cool for gamers, a mixed bag for manufacturers: on the one hand, it does away with the clumsy distribution network and lets you sell direct to the consumer, but on the other hand, by selling miniatures like you sell information, you lose one of the biggest advantages of physicality: strong protection against pirating.
Virtual Reality. Like most things, VR gets less sexy the realer it becomes. Nowadays it makes one think of people playing America's Army while wearing dorky headgear. But one of Jaron Lanier's original visions of VR was a saxophone that blew mountains, which sounds like the ultimate DM tool to me. Would a technology that created a shared visual & sensory experience as vivid as a computer game, or a dream, but that was as easy to set up and modify during play as a tabletop RPG bring new players into the hobby? You betcha.
Drugs. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Philip K. Dick wrote about Martian colonists who used a hallucinogen to experience shared fantasies of life back on Earth. Thomas Disch's 334 describes groups of people who use a drug to vividly imagine and re-enact everyday life in the Roman Empire. Both were written in the late '60s, well before the arrival of D&D, but if you swap the weird chemicals for weird-shaped dice and the Barbie dolls or museum replicas for miniatures, you've got a pretty prescient description of roleplaying. Psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin has written about "museum doses" of drugs said to reliably enhance sensory perception and the pleasure of aesthetic experience. Along the same lines, we can imagine roleplaying drugs that would enhance imagination, creativity, and the dissociative ability to experience a shared reality. The new players that such drugs would bring in might not be ones we'd want to introduce to Eric's grandmother -- but while recreational drug use may be less reputable than gaming, it's way, way more popular.
(The esteemed gentleman from Stoned Mountain may suggest that such drugs exist already. It's certainly possible that the popularity of RPGs on college campuses in the late '70s was related to a counterculture that embraced drug use and fantasy imagery. We'll probably never know how many campaigns were played to the soundtrack of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" and Led Zeppelin's "Battle of Evermore," or for that matter what percentage of today's gamers get what kind of a buzz on before the dice start rolling.)
Well, that's my list of things that would make the gaming industry of 2014 radically different from what it is today. What will actually happen, of course, will probably be e), none of the above, and f), something much weirder. One way or another, I look forward to seeing y'all then!
