A good number of well respected (and better read) people than I have lately voiced concerns about the state of indie and art gaming in the near future. Consoles, once the easiest and cheapest way to get hyper realistic games, are now regularly passed on the turnpike by off the shelf PCs. And the PCs are slowly being replaced with simpler tablet touchscreen devices. Devices that can play games whenever you want, wherever you are. And, barring some boneheaded designs, are as easy to play on as their original Console counterparts.

 
Good.
 

I’ve been around long enough to know the phrase “zero wait states”. The idea was that the machines will get so powerful that there will be no time delay between when you ask a computer to do something and when it happens. Some current systems take that to heart, most notably Apple. Most current systems are so mired in their computer science that the feel of a machine is a distant fifth priority item to anything else. That is a serious disservice to the power our current computers command. I bring this up because it is no longer vitally important to know that this machine has 1.21 gigawatts of processing power. These easier to use devices *should* be where we are going.

And yet people are freaking out that there will no longer be a venue for “that” kind of application or game. Why not? Touchscreens? They can certainly use controllers just like consoles, if the game works better for it. Big displays? The internal resolution of most tables far exceeds our “high def” televisions, and the devices have been able to drive them for years.

So what is the problem? Visibility of indie and art games? There is this strange thing called an interweb thingy where you can see other peoples opinions about all kinds of things. So what if Steam suddenly closed its doors on PC? As a website alone, even if it were no longer directly selling a thing – it would still be a highly respected resource for new games on the Internet because of its partially crowd based decision system. This is all it takes.

So what is all this grousing about? Things are getting simpler. Apart from a few better cable combinations (free charging cable with hdmi out for iPad) and some extra software support (his controller support via Bluetooth), we are already there with a bright future. People who want to know should be able to learn what they want about machines. But for the bulk of the world, they should not *need* to know. And that is exactly where we are heading.