The Future of Gaming

Personally, I'm not a fan of technological advancement in gaming - I like pen and paper. As I've written before, for me, RPGs belong to a certain category of pastime that benefits from being lo-tech.

Nonetheless, I do sometimes think that 3D printing could be huge. I'm a subscriber to the Economist (in dead tree format, natch), and they go so far as to suggest that 3D printing will be part of the third industrial revolution. I don't know about that, but I do know that I can imagine approximately ten billion uses for 3D printing in gaming, including:

• In-game 3D dungeon mapping
• Printing dice (no more "Can I borrow your d20?")
• Printing customised minis
• Printing 3D tactical maps

I also think it won't be long before you will be able to go to the Games Workshop website, fork over some cash (undoubtedly grossly inflated), and have a file sent to your computer allowing you to print 30 space marines or whatever in the comfort of your own living room.

I won't welcome these developments, necessarily, but I think they are probably inevitable. 3D printers may be in the hands of consumers within the next few years, and I do not doubt that the major gaming companies are already thinking of ways to exploit them. I think this, more than actual online gaming, will be the major development in the hobby through to 2020. You read it here first.

Grist for the Hard SF Mill

The BBC has a fascinating article about real-life asteroid mining today.

Apart from being, to me, an amazing story about human ingenuity, and proof that future resource constraints will just make humanity cleverer and more ambitious in all manner of ways - there are two things about the story that strike a chord with me.

First, this:

If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land.

That's an elementary lesson in setting design (people don't settle new lands for the hell of it), but also for game design. What do characters do in a Traveller game? Go after resources, or do something related to that. How will society develop? It will be focused on resources. So the message to GMs is: think about where the resources are in your subsector and how they are connected. Everything should come after that.

Second, this:

Water from asteroids could be broken down in space to liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel. Water is very expensive to get off the ground so the plan is to take it from an asteroid to a spot in space where it can be converted into fuel.

This ties oddly into conversations I've been having by email with Patrick recently, but the future is water. I don't think we'd end up using ice as currency, because it would be too useful as fuel (it's a bit like using steel for currency a la Dragonlance), but you can easily imagine wars over otherwise completely insignificant icy rocks orbiting Uranus some time in our semi-distant future, can't you?