The fine line between realities: Introducing the Synergy age

I recently read an article which stated that by 2015 50% of businesses will have introduced gamification as a tool to increase productivity in the workplace. Gamification describes the process of creating games out of menial administrative tasks. By creating an animated world with characters and a storyline simple spreadsheet activities become “games” by which you can measure your progress, save and re-explore. This is an interesting development, but above the potential of a more enjoyable workplace this movement towards gamification reveals a broader trend about our rapidly changing relationship with technology.

The media-tech term for this phenomenon is synergy. Take a look around you, we are living in the synergy age. Synergy denotes the integration of various technologies into increasingly simpler formats. We have lived in the age when the services we use are becoming integrated. The capabilities of mobile phones, television, radio, paging/texing and the Internet can all now be found on singular devices. Our technology is moving towards a singularity, a single point where we can consume all of our creations simultaneously and at speed. Our ascension into the synergy age can be charted in the development of the computer games industry, where the distinctions between our shared conscious realities and our virtual ones are similarly striving for this singular point.

The Nintendo Wii marks one such step in this process. Through our actions in the real world we immediately impact upon the results of the game in the virtual space. Graphics themselves continuously strive for realism. Whilst we saw a trend in stylised unreal depictions of reality through the animated technique of cel-shading for a time, major game developers appear to be striving toward sating a market that wants gritty realism. Some of the most successful and well known games today, from Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and the FIFA franchise pride themselves on blurring the lines between reality and fiction, that is to say, they aim to create such perfect replications of reality, that we may in turn often reject spending time in our actual reality for the one they've created for us.

But gamers are more savvy than this as they recognise the limitations of the game mechanics. As it stands today computer games have easily chartable boundaries which direct you like a lost child by the hand down the path and through their stories. If the previous decade has taught us anything about the synergy age, it is that those limitations (as in the rest of technological society) are gradually falling away. The seminal game Deus Ex was released in June 2000 and bought the concept of story choice into the mainstream. Unusually most characters can be killed, actions (that if you wish to take) will change the fabric of the story you are creating for yourself. Several important decisions have several possibilities, greatly increasingly the probability that no two replays of the game will be the same. In recent years games like Mass Effect have pioneered this concept of choice, although in a way that is still reductive, directing you towards clear moral binary options of good and evil (or as the game terms it Paragon and Renegade).

So what will the future of gaming hold? What we do know is that gamification in its myriad forms will not go away. According to an article in the Telegraph computer gaming overtook the film industry in 2009. For 12 months up to September 2009 £1.73 billion was spent on computer games in the UK alone, compared to £1 billion spent on box office films in the same period. Games are beginning to dominate our lives and in turn influencing our perceptions of reality. Games are continuously striving towards reality, and reality is increasingly striving towards games. I predict that within our lifetimes we may very well witness the point where these areas meet. Biology and technology will be further integrated which will in turn raise important questions about what it means to be human as well as opening up deeper questions of how we come to understand notions of reality.

For me the warnings about such a future are clear in the present. There are countless stories in China of teenagers dying after up to 50 hours of playing World of Warcraft because they've neglected to eat or sleep. It is important that we do not let game realities become a replacement, but instead that we utilise them as tools we can detach ourselves from in order to make greater sense of our reality. I am however similarly excited about the potential of our virtual world to create a greater physical one. As the boundaries in computer games fall (and the ability of machines becomes greater) we shall be able to create safe havens for unlimited choice. I envisage a future where characters will be customisable to the minutest detail, where we can create entire worlds that match the imagination of our dreams, where we test consequences, where we are no longer limited to the games that are prescribed to us, but where we are instead sold the tools to become masters of our universes. I, like many, feel that their perfect game has yet to be made. Perhaps in the future I will be able to play the civilisation based strategy game with RPG and FPS capabilities that I have been dreaming of. Until then watch this space. Only then we may have forgotten whether that space is virtual or real.