Game Technology: Quietly Changing the World

Today, games are gradually evolving from virtual environments to "super digital scenes", and in the future, the boundaries between virtual and reality will undoubtedly continue to blur, and games are quietly changing the world. How did games change the world?

In 2014, when the book "Games Change the World" was first published, Luo Zhenyu wrote this recommendation:

Looking at the far side of the Internet, there are two veins looming -

First, the mechanism of collaboration changed from coercion to freedom;

Second, the motivation for labor changed from self-interest to play.

So, the word "game" is undergoing a historic metamorphosis, and the game will not only be a game, it may be the whole picture of our future life.

Today, 8 years later, when we look back at this sentence, we will suddenly find that everything around us is really as the title of the book says:

The game changes the world.

I. Diffusion of Innovation: Understanding the "Hummingbird Effect" of the Game Industry

Dutch historian John Whisinga, in his 1938 book Homo Ludens, argued that games were "something older than culture."

He saw games as the starting point for complex human activities such as language, law, war, philosophy, and art.

That's right, humans need games, it's a low-cost simulation of the real world, a condensed life stripped of redundancy and triviality, an experience that gets feedback and fun quickly.

In the past, the discussion of games was mainly limited to the category of "interactive entertainment".

However, in recent years, both industry and academia have begun to pay more and more attention to the competitiveness and significance of the game industry beyond "entertainment".

Recently, Tencent Game Academy and He Jing, a team of professors from the New Media Research Center of the School of Journalism of Tsinghua University, jointly released the "Game Technology Power Report".

In this report, the researchers consulted the international authoritative academic database Web of science, using "Game Technology" as the search term, and finally found 19406 pieces of literature data.

From the statistical results, computer science, engineering, mathematics, business economics, and education are the five disciplines frequently involved in game technology research.

Today's industry discussion of games and the technology behind them now goes beyond games themselves.

The report pointed out that as the fastest growing industry, the largest user base and the deepest degree of interdisciplinary integration in the global digital culture industry, games have played a role as a "test field" and "booster" for scientific and technological innovation.

Such a role is actually a kind of "hummingbird effect".

The hummingbird effect is a term that describes the progress of one technology that brings about the progress of other technologies, and aims to describe the diffusion of innovation.

In the distant Cretaceous Period, flowers and bees began to co-evolve, forming a completed ecological closed loop of pollination with each other.

But this unexpectedly triggered the evolution of another species - hummingbirds, the bones of birds are actually not suitable for hover flight, but in order to maximize the use of honey in pollen, hummingbirds accidentally evolved the rare hovering skills in the biological world.

In the development of science and technology, there is no lack of hummingbird effect, and the development of one technology drives the progress of another technology.

For example, printing accidentally led to the development of astronomy and biology.

The mechanism behind it is that printing led to the popularization of reading, and the popularity of reading in Europe at that time brought a lot of myopia, myopia promoted the development of the Italian glasses industry, and the refinement of the glass lenses for the manufacture of glasses led to the invention of telescopes and microscopes, which promoted the progress of astronomy and biology.

The progress of the game industry, and the development of related industries, is the obvious "hummingbird effect".

For example, in the past, players' pursuit of game graphics and performance has driven the advancement of graphics cards and GPUs, and the progress of GPUs, also known as the computing power basis of deep learning, indirectly promoted the progress of artificial intelligence.

Nowadays, the high-fidelity technology of games has promoted the development of the virtual human industry, the progress of game engines has begun to become "industrial design software", and game rendering technology has gradually been widely used in digital twins, industrial digitalization, intelligent collaboration, simulation and other fields.

From consumption to production – games are spilling over

Many of the important technological significances of human beings are sometimes not in themselves.

When the United States launched the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s, many Americans questioned how relevant the 11-year, $25.5 billion project was to the public.

They believe that this money should actually be spent to solve existing problems on Earth rather than the illusory space.

However, later facts proved that in addition to the breakthrough significance of the Apollo program in the field of aerospace, the more important thing is the leapfrog progress of the United States in the field of materials, polymers, precision instruments, surveying and mapping, automation, computers and other key technologies in the implementation of this program.

According to incomplete statistics, there are now more than 3,000 technical applications derived from the Apollo program, including air cushion shoes, quick-freezing, solar energy, water purification technology and so on.

Therefore, when a technology and an industry use cross-compound technology, it often has an important spillover effect on technology and promotes the development of other fields.

The game industry is such a composite technology.

Today, the global gaming industry is a staggering $170 billion, and judging by that figure, it makes the gaming market more than twice as large as the global record music industry (about $19 billion) and the global box office (about $43 billion) combined.

The huge game industry has now surpassed its interactive entertainment industry itself, and has begun to overflow to multiple industries such as entertainment, education, medical care, film and television, and gradually shows a strong positive externality.

The game industry began to spill over from a purely consumer business to a productivity business.

The "Game Technology Force Report" believes that relying on the virtual simulation environment created by technology, game technology has formed a "game +" economic model with technology as the core.

Virtual human technology benefits from the maturity of game technology.

Virtual digital people are virtual avatars with human characteristics created through graphic rendering, motion capture, deep learning and other technologies.

The field of games is one of the early experimental fields of virtual digital people, and then with the advancement of game technology and computer vision technology, the maturity of related technologies such as CG, speech recognition, image recognition, motion capture, real-time rendering, etc., virtual people are increasingly moving towards the direction of "full authenticity and interaction" of immersiveness.

From "Hatsune Mirai" to "Luo Tianyi", from digital Huang Jenxun to virtual astronaut reporter XiaoYi, from the demon catcher Liu Yexi to the fashionista "Star Pupil", from holographic concerts to virtual human variety shows, today's virtual people have become a booming industry.

According to the Qubits report, it is expected that the size of China's virtual person market will reach 270.3 billion yuan by 2030.

Games have also been widely used in many fields such as cultural relics protection and cultural dissemination.

In 2022, the China Cultural Relics Conservation Foundation and Tencent jointly launched the "Great Wall of Clouds" Mini Program, allowing users to experience the "Repair Officer" of the Great Wall in the Mini Program.

By climbing the "Digital Great Wall", users can do archaeological cleanup of the vicissitudes of the city wall, add a brick to the missing steps, and more deeply realize the importance of protecting cultural heritage and inheriting historical roots.

In 2020, American innovative game company Akili Interactive developed a video game called EndeavoRx, which is not intended for entertainment, its goal is to solve the problem of ADHD in children.

After rigorous clinical trials, the game has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of ADHD in children aged 8 to 12 years, an important breakthrough in the game's application to the healthcare system.

The game can even participate in environmental protection and combat climate change.

When Niantic, Inc, the American software development company that develops and distributes Pokemon Go, called on players to collect trash on Earth Day 2019, more than 17,000 people from 41 countries joined the call, picking up more than 145 tons of trash together.

At the same time, the game world has also given birth to simulation games like World without Oil, which aims to brainstorm and thus avoid the challenge of global oil shortages.

Game technology is also widely used in the field of education.

"Gamification teaching" has become an important theme in the field of education, and MIT has partnered with game developers to implement the TEA (The Education Arcade) program to apply emerging technologies such as somatosensory and augmented reality to the development of educational games.

Beijing launched its first "5G+VR" classroom in 2019, which was landed and put into use at chaoyang district experimental primary school. By wearing a VR device, students can freely travel in panoramic videos and engage in immersive learning on their own.

The automotive industry has also benefited from technology born out of games.

For example, as a real-time 3D creation platform, game engines can be applied to subdivisions such as automotive industry design, simulation training and autonomous driving.

For example, in terms of automatic driving, Tencent TAD Sim introduced UE4, which simulates the weather and traffic conditions under real driving conditions with the help of a physics engine, which can achieve environmental simulation effects.

The game engine-driven digital twin system can also help with smart city planning, assisting the intelligent scheduling of urban transportation, ports and other infrastructure.

For example, Hong Kong Airport and Shenzhen's Yantian Port have developed digital operation and maintenance systems for airports and ports based on digital twins.

So why does gaming as an industry have such a strong spillover effect?

The Game Technology Force Report gives an explanation mechanism - game technology mainly achieves integration empowerment by optimizing production factors in different fields, updating its original business system, spawning new business models, or building new digital scenarios and innovating its industrial form.

As Charlene, vice president of Tencent Games and dean of Tencent Game Academy, said at the recent ICSS2022 Academic Committee:

Technology is an essential component of the game's boundaries and a catalyst for the game industry's creative process, and from the perspective of the tech industry, the game industry has made advances in multiple technologies that are also being associated with potential disruptive innovations across multiple industries.

Tencent Game Academy has been committed to game industry research, scientific research cooperation and discipline construction.

In the first half of this year, in addition to the above reports, the academy has also released a number of research results such as "The Application of E-sports and Games in the Construction of Urban Cultural Brands" and "The White Paper on the Application of Vibration and Tactile Feedback Technology in the Barrier-free Field".

Through these results, we can very intuitively see the spillover effect of the game.

Build your imagination for the future: Games are the world

The internet connects the worlds together, and games open up visual scenes and social spaces for connections.

It is precisely because of the participation of people and the embedding of relationship networks that the virtual environment has a strong realistic color and social significance.

In recent years, different industries around the world are entering digital transformation, the integration and symbiosis of the digital economy and the real economy has become an inevitable trend, the value boundaries of games are constantly expanding, the game itself has become thicker, and the significance of game technology in the future has risen to a new height.

In my opinion, the reason why games will become the cornerstone of future digital-real fusion is mainly because they occupy a key position in the input system and output system.

What does that mean?

Any computing platform is inseparable from two parts – input and output.

Look at the input first, from the 0 input in the TV era, to the keyboard and mouse in the PC era, and then to the touch in the mobile phone era, in the past, our input was relatively single in dimension, and it could not intuitively reflect our "spirit" including actions, demeanor, and emotions.

Therefore, as a person, it is difficult for us to express it in the virtual world represented by games at present.

With important game-based technological advances such as motion capture, eye tracking, expression capture, and haptic feedback, the input bandwidth will certainly increase.

At this time, as human beings, we will greatly increase our vividness in the virtual world, rather than a simple kneaded head or a bust without legs.

Looking at the output, based on its powerful rendering capabilities, the game technology itself can efficiently and high-qualityly build digital scenes with shape, sound and color from 0, which can more realistically simulate the real world and dissolve the boundaries between reality and virtuality.

Therefore, in the more macro next-generation Internet "super digital scene", game technology will in a sense become the "meta-technology" in the future digital-real integration industry, and will play the role of "dream-making workshop" infrastructure.

From papyrus to the Internet, every innovation in communication technology will reshape the way human beings perceive as a whole, and the medium not only extends the human body's sensory system, but also extends the way human beings exist.

In digital life, games as a highly evolved medium, game technology has become a new channel for humans to perceive and experience the world.

The Game Technology Force Report believes that games are gradually evolving from virtual environments to "super digital scenes", and there are two major trends worth paying attention to:

Both of these points are intended to show that the game industry will help the collaborative upgrading of the industrial chain and the innovation chain.

In the future, the boundaries between virtual and real will undoubtedly continue to blur, and the process of humanity's great migration to the game world will not stop in the past, present and future.

The game will be bigger than we think.

#专栏作家 #

Wei Xi, WeChat public account: Wei Xi Zhibei (ID: weixizhibei), everyone is a product manager columnist, 2018 author of the year. A broad-interested advertising product manager dedicated to dissecting internet-related logic in simple language.

This article was originally published in Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.