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Changing Entertainment


Asperion

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. . .or not.  Looking at how people entertain themselves over time makes one wonder how little things have really changed. Best forms of entertainment in antiquity were races,  strength-based, agility-honing, or strategic.  Today,  the games most revered will all have some version of the above,  just with electronic overlay.  Looking into the future,  I am expecting that electronic treatment to get more so in the games.  I was wondering if anyone saw things differently,  any flaws in reasoning.  Anything else that you would like to add would be greatly appreciated. 

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Chuck Klosterman's But What If We're Wrong? has some interesting thoughts about the essential impossibility of forecasting the future. But he does note how some cultural and technological elements have existed so long they are probably not going to change much in the future. Like, knives were invented in the Stone Age. We don't usually chip them out of stone anymore, but they are still knives. Spoons are also darn old. The most recent eating implement, the spork, does not seem to be taking the world by storm. So a thousand years from now, people will still probably still use knives, forks, spoons, chopsticks or just fingers to eat.

 

Many forms of entertainment are also ancient and culturally near-universal. Every culture sings. Everyone tells stories. Everyone dances. Any technological change is likely going to happen at the edges and be a brief fad. Like, I don't expect auto-tune distortion to be a thing a hundred years from now, let alone a thousand. We use different tools to sculpt and paint, but sculpture and painting go back to the Stone Age: They too shall continue.

 

In sports and games, contests of strength, speed, agility, skill and strategy are based on fundamantal human capabilities and so will likewise continue despite superficial changes. The largest changes may be in context. For instance, big spectator team sports like football may become virtual, with computer-generated players. But people will still want to get together in person to run around and throw a ball.

 

I've followed the "Futuristic Sports and Entertainment" thread... and been impressed by just how *not futuristic* a lot of it is. Behind the techno razzle dazzle, we like the same things as people 500, 5,000 or 50,000 years ago.

 

Dean Shomshak

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70s Entertainment - Classic Entertainment but with Disco Balls

80s Entertainment - Classic Entertainment but with Synthesizers

Current Entertainment - Classic Entertainments but with Internet Connectivity and LED color lights

 

In seriousness though, even modern entertainment is just taking even older things and putting them on TV or Internet broadcast to get new audiences.   Case in point i recently discovered Axe Throwing, Knight Throwing and Profession Tag showing on ESPN.   With a little research all of these are Multi-national sport leagues that have all started up in the last 15 years or so.   

...the more things change.

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I have serious concerns about the substance of entertainment profoundly changing in the future, even if the form does not. Our communication media have rendered our societies increasingly passive consumers of the product of others, rather than participants. As computer-generated animation becomes more ubiquitous and lifelike, and the means through which we interact with it become ever more immersive, I can imagine a day when active participation in our own entertainment will become a fringe activity with few participants.

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33 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I have serious concerns about the substance of entertainment profoundly changing in the future, even if the form does not. Our communication media have rendered our societies increasingly passive consumers of the product of others, rather than participants. As computer-generated animation becomes more ubiquitous and lifelike, and the means through which we interact with it become ever more immersive, I can imagine a day when active participation in our own entertainment will become a fringe activity with few participants.

 

In what way are you thinking?   I mean look at sports entertainment... there is already a huge amount of passiveness there.  I am just curious if you have a more concrete example?

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2 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

 

In what way are you thinking?   I mean look at sports entertainment... there is already a huge amount of passiveness there. 

 

 

Yep.

 

Not sure why, but locally, if you 'love football,"  (ugh) you either play it, or you sit your three-hundred-eighty pound carcass on a barstool or two and watch it for hours on end over an endless stream of very tiny chicken wings slathered in some sort of flavored syrup.

 

Locally, there is no in between.

 

Cant see that getting....  Well, I wanted to say "better," but I realize I am forcing my own thoughts on health as "good," when everyone involved seems pretty happy with the current situation, so let me just say that I can't see it getting different as time goes by, save for a decreasing number of people in the shape to actually play.

 

 

Edited by Duke Bushido
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14 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

 

In what way are you thinking?   I mean look at sports entertainment... there is already a huge amount of passiveness there.  I am just curious if you have a more concrete example?

 

Virtual reality is the trend I'm thinking of. You now have people playing "sports" using lifelike images of real athletes, in their chair with a controller. You have people taking virtual "tours" of places they'll never see in real life. Whose whole method of communicating with others is via electronic media, even when it's possible to be physically present with them. And whose idea of "gaming" is following a limited number of computer-generated paths and options spelled out by someone else they'll never even meet. Increasingly, people are able to take their media with them and consume them anywhere, for instant gratification. The latest VR tech even shuts them off almost completely from the rest of the world. And we're getting closer to the time when the people we watch and listen to perform are artificially generated, to the point where most of us won't be able to tell the difference between them and real people.

 

How long before everything we experience is divorced from reality, and we no longer even recognize what the real experience is like? We just let some caste of specialists craft fantasies for us to live in.

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20 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

Virtual reality is the trend I'm thinking of. You now have people playing "sports" using lifelike images of real athletes, in their chair with a controller. You have people taking virtual "tours" of places they'll never see in real life. Whose whole method of communicating with others is via electronic media, even when it's possible to be physically present with them. And whose idea of "gaming" is following a limited number of computer-generated paths and options spelled out by someone else they'll never even meet. Increasingly, people are able to take their media with them and consume them anywhere, for instant gratification. The latest VR tech even shuts them off almost completely from the rest of the world. And we're getting closer to the time when the people we watch and listen to perform are artificially generated, to the point where most of us won't be able to tell the difference between them and real people.

 

How long before everything we experience is divorced from reality, and we no longer even recognize what the real experience is like? We just let some caste of specialists craft fantasies for us to live in.

 

Look at what is put into those vr systems  - electronic equivalent to what people have always been playing. Essentially everything that humanity has played has been invented thousands of years ago and been getting new  concepts done to them every generation. 

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As I wrote before, the form isn't changing, but the substance is. Why should people actually go out and do any of these things to gain the experience, when they can have it handed to them in the comfort of their own homes? We're already seeing the health effects, physical and mental, of an increasingly inactive and isolated society.

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VR is complicated. As a medium it’s changing and progressing rapidly. The physical activity is increasing with suits and controllers, so that there is a subculture of dancers in VRChat, and the price of no cap suits has dropped to $500. The attraction of VRChat is an active social environment that one does not need to leave the house for. This will become more attractive when progressive cities prohibit private motor vehicles. 
 

I am trying to set up a passive income stream by making full featured VR avatars for VRChat, and other environments. It’s a subject that has become a lot deeper than expected. 

Edited by Scott Ruggels
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