In reviewing the chapters of the textbook, there are multiple chapters covering video games, virtual reality, and esports. This is an area that I am very interested in as I have been an avid gamer for quite some time. I'm guessing I'm probably a little older than most of the students in the class and while home video game consoles are pretty ingrained into our culture today, I am old enough to say I got to see where it started. Now, I'm not speaking of the old Atari 2600 consoles or anything released prior to the video game crash of 1983. I'm talking about the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 and how home consoles have become a normal part of many living rooms in the 3+ decades since.
Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi said in 1986, "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." Nintendo would counter this issue by making fewer higher-quality games and by 1988 they were the undisputed leader in the video game industry. Over the decades that followed we have seen console competition from companies like Sega, Sony, and Microsoft (whose Xbox has been their only major success in manufacturing hardware, interestingly enough) and the video game industry has grown to financial heights projected to reach $230 billion by 2022 in the U.S. alone.
As a gamer, I have owned the original NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube, PlayStation, Xbox, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4, and have recently purchased both the NES Classic and Super Nintendo Classic consoles. Needless to say, I've dropped my fair share of money into games. But each time a new console is released, we're entertained for a bit before inevitably looking forward to what is coming next. The PlayStation 4, for example, was an 8th generation console released in 2013, and while that system was groundbreaking at the time, it was announced in 2019 that the PlayStation 5 is expected to launch in late 2020 marking the sunset on the previous generation's console.
Graphically there's only so much that can be done from each generation to the next. The same goes for gameplay. If you look at the Madden NFL football games released yearly by Electronic Arts, you eventually begin to realize that you're paying $60 each year for what amounts to a roster update. As EA is the only company officially licensed by the NFL to use player likenesses in their games, it makes sense that there is a sense of complacency due to the lack of competition unlike 1995 to 2005 when 989 Sports' NFL GameDay and Visual Concepts' NFL 2K series were directly competing with Madden. That's where I believe that VR gaming is the next step for gaming.
While virtual reality is not exactly a new concept to gaming with Sega announcing a home version of the Sega VR headset in 1991 (which was cancelled) and Nintendo releasing the Virtual Boy in 1996, the early attempts were met with indifference from consumers and investors. However, in the latter half of the 2010's this technology picked up again with 230 companies developing VR-related products by 2016. I would like to research this technology and see what the future may hold for VR gaming.
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