My rant about the gaming industry. (Blog assignment 2)

Nowadays multiplayer support for video games is assumed to always be there, every newly released game should have a multiplayer component of some sort whether it's a full multiplayer experience or just some semi-multiplayer component. Games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Battlefield are just some of the many games that benefit from having multiplayer support. What most people might not understand is that providing a server is not easy or cheap, so what do the gaming companies do if they cannot afford to keep the server running?  They shut the servers down, disabling the multiplayer support of the game.

Now things like this always get me thinking about games we buy today. That at some point in the future, a large portion of the game you paid money for will become forever inaccessible. To be replayed only in your memories. Sometime in the future, years from now when I go to play my Battlefield 3 game, I will ONLY have the single player experience to enjoy. Games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 will turn into short episodic single player games. The highest difficulty setting on these games will be virtually impossible to beat since you only have your terrible computer-driven companions at your side.

Years from now games such as the newly released Mass Effect 3, multiplayer servers will shut down causing a large portion of the game to go to waste, since you need to access the multiplayer portion of the game to continue on your single player campaign.

It is sad to know that games we play today have content which has a limited lifespan. Large portions of our games will stop existing, never to be relived again. And with today’s gaming industry more and more games are having multiplayer content interlaced with the single player experience.

Cheers!

/Stefan

The Social Network

"Kenan likes this" is something we all are way to familiar seeing, modern day social networks are evolving into something beyond being a way to communicate. It is becoming a substitute for communication. People nowadays are way to obsessed with social networks such as Facebook, have you ever seen people sitting next to each other looking down at their phones? This "thing" is changing  the way people communicate. I make my assumptions based on these predictions, people nowadays are way to lazy to go out and socialize, people are obsessed with informing and knowing what other people are doing and finally to be able to contact anyone at anytime (as long as they are available at the computer).

I believe that in the following 1-5 years that the social network craze will increase, but there will still be people that stay away from it. This will further more increase the fact that people are frequently making status updates and "checking" in at places they visit. The little amount of people that are not using any social network will be ignored.

And 6-50 years later the whole world will be stuck in front of their computers/cellphones updating,checking in, chatting and sending virtual "pokes" to each other. The social aspect of human communication will be completely gone.

Cheers,

Stefan