Edge magazine speaks to William Gibson, Richard Morgan and Alastair Reynolds about what high-tech videogame developments we can expect
How will videogames have evolved in ten years' time? How will you be playing them? SFX 's sister magazine Edge , the influential and long-running games title, asked some big thinkers to forecast what digital fun migh༺t be like in the years aheꦬad.
As well as like former Sony bigwig Phil Harrison (who predicts the decline of console gaming and a rise in free-to-play models) they also spoke to top SF writers, many of whom will be familiar to regular SFX readers.
Scientist and novelist Alastair Reynolds (renown for signing a £1 million deal with book publishers Gollancz) talks about the rise of augmented reality - "[the tಌrend] will continue until we reach the seamless integration of the real world and the augmented world, and the technology will be increasingly less clunky," he tells them, although adding a caveat to 𒅌the article that "one of the problems with predicting the future is you tend to overestimate change on a short-term timescale. I remember reading an article from 2000 speculating on what the average home PC of the year 2010 would be like and it was wildly inaccurate. ten years is not that long in terms of some sort of development timescale."
The mag also grills cyberspace legend William Gibs♉on, who talks about how "the distinction we now insist on drawing ✅between [real and virtual worlds] will eventually seem quaint and arbitrary."
Visitors to the first SFX Weekender in 2010 will have had a chance to see Richard Morgan, SF and fantasy writer and also the scribe behind this year's game Crysis 2 ; in the Edge article he cast♌s a sceptical eye over visor-based gaming and𝓡 augmented reality.
, which is on sale until 5 July.
