The Future of Gaming

Maybe not what you're looking for, but I imagine all next gen consoles to be your normal controller, only split (like the Wii's Nunchuck and Wiimote), and having motion sensing and a pointer (like the Wiimote). That way you have full controller functionality and extra features, without impeding on basic game play.

If you want the next step in interactivity, go to www.emotiv.com.
But I just like to show that to people. On an actually related note: more realistic violence will be, if anything, better. Those of us who need to vent out our violent impulses can do it much more effectively through such video games.

WTF? Which part of the "current system" appears to "work as intended" to you? The 14 y/o kids shooting up their schools? The 12 y/o kids raping one another? Or the 10 y/o kids becoming suicide bombers?
And you can blame video games for all of the above if you'd like, but one should keep in mind that humans have been doing horrible things to one another for thousands of years without the aid of video games, or TV, or movies. Parents who raise their children to be criminals without video games are exactly the same parents who raise their children to be criminals with video games.
FFS, I'm a complete mental fuckup who lives in computer games and loves senseless massacre of virtual life forms, but I would never hurt another human being IRL. Why on earth would anyone be unable to draw the line between games and reality? Don't you think that people who are unable to see the difference between games and reality are a danger to society in the first place?

</rant>

Now, to a more important topic - how on earth do you take a screenshot from such a totally immersive VR game?

Clearly there is a line. It is silly to say that this will never be an issue in the future, given futuristic technology. The reason is because of how our brains are limited. I don't mean the brains of the scientists doing the engineering, but that of the consumers. Human beings, by nature, are learning all the time, even as adults. Children are a special case because they are learning about 100x faster, as well as having about 1000x less experience to use to filter and interpret the lessons they're being given. Furthermore, human beings are only able to distinguish reality from fantasy up to a point. We are easily fooled by dreams. Even other people's white lies can convince us of a reality that isn't true. If my younger brother can lie to me and make me believe it's true, can we really be that far away from a game which fools us into thinking something is reality when it really isn't? Starship enterprise holo-deck style, as an easy example. Whether we're only 5 years or 500 years away from that, it's the natural progression of the OP's line of thinking.

And when we get to that point, we will start learning from this faux-reality whether we want to or not. Here's a scenario: dad is out of the house, 8 year old timmy accidentally hits the power button to the Xbox10million. Holographic people start appearing around the room, and timmy gets a shotgun. Eventually he'll figure out he can use it to kill the people in the room without consequences, and every time he does, he finds a wallet full of cash. How can he be blamed, after the game ends, for going out and buying a real shotgun and shooting up some people for the money to buy an awesome toy?

When society reaches that point, there will be a tremendous amount of responsibility on the part of the game designers and legislatures, and possibly parents as well, to assist in making it clear what is reality and what isn't reality, and to not deliberately mislead people.

It shouldn't be scary that the principles of Jack Thompson's arguments become valid in this scenario, because stripped down to their core, they make perfect sense. The problem comes when he accuses perfectly innocuous games as crossing this line, when they clearly don't. He makes people think that he's a lunatic.

The future is scary. And yes, this is a trend which could potentially lead to a world that is very much unfamiliar. But this wouldn't be the first time for the human race to deal with something like that, and we've done perfectly fine so far. I'm sure that we'll adapt and be fine, but not until some people learn from their mistakes the hard way, given this new technology.

The problem is there will always be that fine line between people who understand reality and the people who don't.  Most people can tell the difference between people dying in fiction (whether it be movies or videos games) and people who die in real life.  The real problem I see is not the fiction aspect of the real aspect when you see it in news.  After a while people will get desensitized to death and look at it just another thing that happens.  The real problem comes is after that happens, people will begin thinking human life is cheap (then again I think most governments already think that) and the consequences can be very very bad.

On the note of new types of controls.  I think the next best thing will be augmented reality.  Basicly putting people in the game via cameras much or bringing things into reality like the that one ps3 game, Eye of Judgment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5WCwEYnng

Interesting enough there a toolkit out there where you can try to do this yourself, or at least something really basic. Like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFfkOw39o4E

Woot Melty Blood Madness

How often does a person really stop to engage the rational parts of their brain in order to decide whether or not they're experiencing reality though? Some people do it quite often during dreams - some people not at all. And how many people seriously do it during real life, and how often? I'd estimate that I have a 10% chance of identifying that I was in a dream, and I've probably only ever wondered I was dreaming while awake maybe 5 times in my life. I mean, the very notion of being fooled is that your rational faculties are not focused on deciding that at the time. If you tell a clueless guy who's getting ripped off by a street vendor "hey man, you might be getting scammed" then he'll have a much better chance of realizing it, but that's the trick isn't it?

Also, dreams have been around for a long time. Everyone knows that if something isn't a dream, then it's reality, and vice versa. Unhealthy people may be subject to psychosis or fevered hallucinations, but the vast majority of us have only those two states. What happens when a third is suddenly introduced, as a new breakthrough in entertainment, which people find to be indistinguishable from reality? That's mostly what I was talking about.

I think full body motion capture would be a little more difficult than rock band. I was referring here mostly to that idea. You'd have the VR equipment AND the space you need to move around. The guitar takes up space, yes, but that's not anything new. Real guitars take up space too, but you don't need very much room to play them. If you're playing some shooter where you have to duck and aim and shoot and step and whatnot, I imagine it would not be very convenient to play that if you had a small room. (But I could be wrong, I'm just guessing)

Of course, we could go back and forth all day about this. My main point is I doubt body capture VR is the future of gaming. I hope it isn't either. I'd rather go to a gun range and shoot a gun than dance around my living room like a lunatic trying to simulate the real thing.

This whole topic reminds me of that boxing arcade game that had motion sensors and you had to duck and throw punches and whatnot. Area 51 had huge lines. That game was barren.

Before recently, most full body VR setups allowed you to duck and lean as you wanted, but you were standing in a small enclosed ring, so you couldn't walk on your own anywhere, walking was done by joystick.  So it allowed you limmited immersion, though it was still cool.   Most of them had a setup something like this:
http://www.olebouman.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/vr_machine.jpeg 

Even that kind of a setup takes up a decent amount of space, and is a pretty hefty equipment investment.  To allow you to get real walking, there's even more sophisticated stuff:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill    I could see VR of this sort becoming popular only on the same scale as laser tag, as you mentioned.   You'll have to go somewhere to play, have to wait for your chance to play, then get some limited 15 minutes of play and pay an exorbitant amount of money for it.    Laser tag is fun, no doubt, but having to go somewhere and pay a lot kinda kills it.

For 'true' VR in the home to become prevalent, we'll need something similar to what we see in sci-fi; like The Matrix or Tom Clancy's Net Force:  direct neural stimulation, whether through some headgear or implanted probe.  This will allow us to get the feeling of moving around in all directions without needing to flail our arms about.  We could then sit down in any chair in our house in one place, and experience virtual reality.   Of course, this is more than 10-15 years away to coming into our homes, and even still is a rather scary concept.

  At the same time, even a limited amount of extra interaction using a bit more of your body was popular.   Look at the Time Crisis series of lightgun shooters.   If both Area 51 and Time Crisis were in the same arcade, the Time Crisis would have 3x the people waiting to play it.  Some people would really get into it also, ducking when their player did even though they didn't need to.   I think that's a viable option for gaming, to think of smart ways to utilize some of your body more without making it a full-out body exhausting experience.   Some Wii games "get it", others go to the extreme to make you flail about. Because when it becomes exhausting, you kinda don't want to play a game, you might as well go outside.   A few months ago I got the racing wheel for the xbox 360.  Playing forza on it is a lot of fun, and it lets me use my feet and arms in a way more naturally conducive to driving.  However when I want to play and win a lot of races, it's too tiring to be fighting against the force feedback all the time.  Luckily, you can just unplug it from the wall and the force feedback goes away, but the batteries let the unit still talk to the xbox.

  Well if you woke up from sleep straight into virtual reality, then it might be rather hard, I'll admit, to tell the difference between that and reality.   But playing a game as it is today, even as games become more realistic, you still have the context of "Hey, I'm going to play a game."   You can buy a large HDTV today and buy high def movies which are even more life-like than previously,  or go to an IMAX, but there's never a question when you sit there of whether this is real or not, you know it's not because you go in there knowing this.  Dreams are so difficult to discern not just because our brain's not functioning as usual, but we're never given that context beforehand.  You go to sleep and then all of a sudden you're having this dream.   Now, if you've got a mental disorder that gives you a disconnect between game and reality, then you've got a problem... but people like that have existed for centuries, and they didn't need video games or movies to make them believe fiction was real.   I don't think it'll change much as games get more real.

"Throw away logic and kick reason to the curb"