When the game spirals with technology

On December 15, the "2021 China Game Industry Annual Conference Science and Technology Symbiosis Forum" hosted by the China Audiovisual and Digital Publishing Association, the Game Working Committee of the China Audio-Digital Association and Tencent Games was held in Guangzhou, and "Talk Later Talk" was also invited to participate.

How games and technology coexist is a very interesting and worthy of extended discussion.

Most people understand that the relationship between games and technology may be technology to the game output technology, such as the existence of a large number of AI characters in "Glory of kings", and recently there have been many game AI entrepreneurial projects. But what many people don't realize is that games have actually begun to reverse the technical output of many industries in society at a very early stage.

In fact, China's game industry has always been in communion and symbiosis with the Internet and software and hardware technology.

Looking back at the history of games and technology, almost every wave of technology is reshaping the appearance and form of games; games have also become an important accelerant for scientific and technological innovation, and many high-tech "pilot" application scenarios have further enhanced the efficiency of scientific and technological innovation while driving the rapid development of many high-precision technology industries.

In 2009, 40% of the apps in the Apple Store were in the game, but today the proportion has dropped to about 20%, and this data reflects that the game may be the first scene to drive the development of hardware.

In our view, there are several areas of support from the gaming industry:

The first is the computing power, including the chip itself. With the continuous improvement of user needs, many application scenarios are provided for these technologies, and the continuous improvement of technology provides strong support for game products, which is an important aspect.

A simple example that is closer to life is that shooter games have very high requirements for computer hardware and software, and when such games were sought after by players in the past few years, it promoted the upgrading of computer hardware and software to a certain extent.

Xu Heng, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm Technologies, also expressed a similar view. For example, he said at the forum on the same day that there are many new technologies applied in the chip field this year, all in order to ensure that the game experience is improved without increasing power consumption.

While we can't attribute all the hardware upgrades to games, it has to be said that games are a big motivator for moving technology forward.

The second is AI. Games are one of the best experimental fields for AI technology, and have also driven the development of AI technology.

Let's take another example. You can see that one of the big trends in the development of games now is that they are becoming more and more realistic, and even want players to be as indistinguishable as possible whether it is a virtual world or a real world.

Why is the game so true? The first point is the advancement of hardware. Because games have such a demand, so the companies that promote NVIDIA invent hardware such as GPUs, and later artificial intelligence experts found that this tool can be used for deep learning of machines, so it eventually became a very important tool in the artificial intelligence industry.

Deng Dafu, deputy general manager of tencent interactive entertainment R&D effectiveness department, said at the annual meeting of China's game industry that the reason why games can develop into "super digital scenes" is inseparable from the technical support brought about by the rapid development of basic computing power, artificial intelligence, graphics and other technologies.

He believes that the game environment provides the best soil for the incubation and development of emerging technologies. With the continuous improvement of the game's demand for computing power, games have become the best test field and booster in frontier fields such as deep reinforcement learning. Now, the AI capabilities accumulated in the game may release greater potential and can be widely used to deal with complex tasks such as collaborative control of artificial satellites and cost reduction and efficiency improvement in industrial manufacturing.

Of course, the technical output of all these games we see today in industry, manufacturing, and biomedicine has been very significant, so will there be a deep integration beyond people's imagination in the future?

The answer is yes.

For example, when many people talk about management recently, there will be a method called "gamification", that is, through the way of games, different challenges and incentive systems are set up for employees and participants of the company to give full play to their initiative.

So we can see that the impact of games on the public is not simply technical.

Philosopher and educator Marshall McLuhan has said that the most important thing about technology is not the technology itself, but the environment behind it that serves it. The example he gave at the time was the automobile: the invention of the automobile itself was not important, what was important was the highway network system and oil service technology that the automobile brought, which had a greater impact on human beings.

If we look at the game industry, the same is true. Most of what we talked about above is the impact of game technology on different industries, but in fact, in the future, the greater impact of games is its impact on people's way of thinking.

If you look at the progress of game development, we are now on the verge of a new era: games are not only the products that game lovers entertain themselves, it is more deeply involved in social development, especially many technologies, such as game engine technology, simulation technology, are having an impact on the world, the future it will have a deeper tolerance with technology, and humans can also use it to build a richer and more creative world. We can wait and see.

If you want to learn more about the symbiosis of games and technology, welcome to "LateTalk" on the Small Universe App, Himalayas and Apple Podcasts to listen to the latest episode of the show "When Games and Technology Spiral", and look forward to more exchanges with us!