This seminar has told a story of boom and bust, of delight in transforming a television screen into a magnificent fantasyland, and of despair in discovering that losses can sometimes come easier than gains. But while the demand for a specific toy or game line, like that for a specific movie, is often volatile and faddish and unpredictable, consolidation of companies into global giants in manufacturing, marketing, and distribution has--along with the resulting assemblage of diversified portfolios (libraries) of branded toy concepts--led to industry earnings trends that are now generally less dependent than previously on the success of just a few promotional items. Also, recent advances in telecommunications make it likely that the structure of both the home video and coin-op segments will change significantly. With fiber-optic linkages to the Internet, highly compressed digital signal transmission capabilities, and substantially greater computing power available at relatively low cost, video games of both varieties will be deliverable to consoles with the same speed and efficiency as a telephone's dial tone. No longer will coin-op require the frequent physical movement of bulky cabinets and circuit boards. And no longer will the home player be limited in selection of titles or of playing partners.
Computerized games will, moreover, increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and so-called virtual-reality capabilities, and will evolve away from those requiring only simple hand-eye coordination skills to those in which thinking strategies and abstract reasoning are helpful factors. Thus challenging interactive role-playing "experiences" will be provided.
However, no matter what the technology or the format, the essence of a successful game will always be the same: It is simple to understand and to play on an elementary level, but it is addictive and maddeningly difficult--in fact, forever impossible--to fully master.
Surely, we will continue to be charmed in ways we can only begin to imagine. For as N. Frude has noted, in The Intimate Machine: Close Encounters with Computers and Robots (1983), with regard to the eventual development of personal robots, another form of computerized entertainment:
The scene is set for entirely new dimensions of human simulation. And the preposterous notion that a future "personal friend" might be purchased off the shelf now has to be seriously considered ... [But still,] getting a machine to laugh is easy. Getting it to laugh at a joke is very, very difficult.
