Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
I have a shelf of old board and card games in my bookshelf. It's made me think a bit about the geekonomy.
A lot of these games I have are a mix of casual games (the old Dr. Who boardgame. No, seriously), and more committed ones (say, Iron Dragon). I recall in the last few weeks seeing an article on what casual gaming is doing to the non-electronic game set. It's really not something I've thought of.
In fact, I doubt it's something that crosses anyone's minds much these days.
In a recent episode of X-Play, a gentleman from www.giantbomb.com was commenting on why games are tough to make – unlike movies, you often have to re-invent at least part of your technology from the start. If you've worked in games (or programming) you know that's not strictly true – there are many development tools – but game development certainly requires a lot of work and a lot of invention if not re-invention.
As I noted that's not strictly true that gaming requires re-invention of technology. It's less true over time, and I think that can signal a shift in gaming.
As I've been contemplating the Everything Wars and content delivery, something struck me about game machines – Wii, X-Box, even DS or PSP.
It seems fairly obvious that the game machines are changing to multi-media machines, as we've mentioned before – Netflix on X-box, e-books on DS, etc. Yet it's still easy to talk about the future of game consoles, handheld games, etc.
I'm starting to think that's the wrong idea.