Dive completely into the game and control the experience with your brain like in Sword Art Online or The Matrix? Steam CEO Gabe Newell believes we are already close to a “computer-brain” interface.
For many gamers and anime fans, it’s a long-held desire. The ability to immerse oneself completely in a game and control it with thought sounds like a distant science fiction. But Steam CEO Gabe Newell sees it differently.
He believes we are much closer to such a scenario than people think.
Who is speaking? Gabe Newell is one of the co-founders of Steam (Valve) and is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and influential men in the gaming business. After all, millions of players worldwide use his service to play games or download new titles every day. Steam is a small empire, and accordingly, what Newell says carries weight.
“We are much closer to the Matrix than people realize”
What did he say? In an interview with IGN, Newell spoke about how close we are with technology to science fiction movies like The Matrix. He said:
We are much closer to the Matrix than people realize. But it won’t be “The Matrix”. “The Matrix” is a movie and lacks all the interesting, technical intricacies and how strange a world with a brain-computer interface will be. This will have a huge impact on the kind of experiences we can create for people.
Moreover, Newell believes that the gaming industry is on the brink of a major upheaval. VR will be taken to a whole new level. For existing forms of entertainment, it could be an “extinction event” – those who miss the technological step will quickly become irrelevant.
Brain-game interface makes Sword Art Online possible
How does it work in Sword Art Online? In the popular anime “Sword Art Online” (one of our best series about MMOs), players not only dive into the game worlds via a VR headset but also with their entire consciousness.
The hardware connects directly with the brain and thus projects the game action directly into the players’ minds. The game is then also controlled through thoughts, which are read by the hardware. It’s as if you are experiencing the game live.
In the anime, this takes a rather dark turn, as players are held captive in the world against their will – but we are likely still some distance away from that in reality.
What do you think, what timeframe is the Steam CEO referring to here? Will we see such technology already in this decade? Or does it still need significantly longer?
Gabe Newell also recently spoke about some other exciting topics related to Steam – and their competition:
