Topic: what will gaming be like in 2050?

It's worth noting that 2050 is only as far away to us as 2000 is. I'm pretty confident an early 2000s me would've said something along the lines of Switch around then if I was asked what the console of 2025 would look like

For example, I distinctly remember around 2002 in the middle of the iPod craze because I was fundamentally against mechanical components on a portable device. Flash was the direction we had to go. And we did go that way. But not before the PSP came out with its UMD which I thought was equally dumb. I was also an early adopter of SSDs. Must've been 2008? 2009? Whenever it was, I was rocking a 30GB boot SSD for a while there. Gaming had to eventually come back to solid state storage, optical media has always been a dead end

Also, I've always been a portable gamer. As a mostly portable gamer the dream has always been to be able to play a game off the TV and continue it on the TV. One of the reasons why I was fairly quickly sold on the Wii U concept, also why I was into in-home streaming on Steam when it came about. A HDMI dock for a properly portable device is less of a revolution and more of just the obvious solution to that. Anyone who has ever used a laptop as their main PC would know this. So the fact that the Switch can, well, Switch.... I think I could've predicted that....

In terms of power? When I think back to the early 2000s we were firmly pre-HD. But HD wasn't a foreign concept. You could've easily predicted a portable console in the next 20 years that was more capable than the next generation of home consoles. Which would've necessarily meant a prediction of a higher resolution portable screen. Which inevitably means it also has to be much larger than the screens on a GBA or nGage. So something like a "portable 360" with a 5-10" 720p screen? Pretty easy to predict I think

If I'm being entirely honest there are two things about the Switch I probably wouldn't have predicted if I was asked in the early 2000s what gaming would look like now. And they're probably not the things you'd expect. Digital Distribution is one of them. Seems odd to say it now but in the early 2000s the internet was just figuring out digital distribution of music. And it was slow. I mean, it's not like I wasn't participating in sailing the seas for games at that point and I knew the internet would eventually get fast enough. It's just I don't think I would've connected those dots

The other thing I don't think I would've guessed would be open world games. In the early 00's all of the best games were very, very tight. I remember around 2001 pouring over grainy images in a magazine of Doom 3. That was what the future of gaming was going to look like. I don't think early 2000s me would've been shocked to see the fidelity of lighting we've achieved or the fact that we're doing real-time ray tracing now (yes, I knew what ray tracing was back then). If you had shown me Doom Eternal or something? I mean cool, but obviously there's where we're going

But if you had shown me RDR2 or BotW or something.... the scale of that would've blown my mind

...... also motion controls, I didn't see motion controls coming

Motion controls is an interesting one because, like VR, they existed in the 90s (and technically even 80s) enough to affect sci fi and such. So if you had asked me as a small child I would have confidently predicted we would all be playing motion control VR games in the 2010s or 2020s. What I definitely wouldn't have predicted is that motion controls would get super popular and then much less popular and then end up as just one minor but standard part of control schemes. And I certainly wouldn't have predicted that my current major use of motion controls would be exercise games.