Trends That Will Define the Future of Online Gaming

From the humble Atari game system to the high-powered consoles we have today, advancements in technology have truly transformed the way we play games. We are no longer limited to a single-player experience, as gaming has made users more connected than ever before. This has opened up a world of possibilities for the industry that keeps coming out with novel innovations.

Read on for the four trends that we think will change the future of online gaming as we know it.

Mobile Gaming

One of the most prominent trends nowadays is the rise of mobile gaming. This isn’t surprising at all considering how the average American’s screen time adds up to 49 days annually. Expect a more pronounced shift to mobile gaming in the coming years as companies capitalize on the mobile gaming market. In fact, CNN reports that Riot Games has already announced that it’s bringing its wildly popular League of Legends to mobile – a significant move considering the company hasn’t released a new game in 10 years.

Blockchain Gaming

Since the cryptocurrency boom, blockchain technology has gained mainstream recognition. It has been applied to a variety of things – from ticketing to inventory control. This technology solves many of the current security woes brought about by decentralizing data, storing it in different blocks distributed across a network of computers. This way, it removes the risk of a single point of failure and makes the manipulation of data near impossible. As the technology is improved and adapted, virtual items continue to carry more real-world value. It makes sense that gaming companies have started integrating blockchain technology, with some games built around this specific concept. For instance, the New York Times reports that a CryptoKitties players, a game that deals solely in the collection of virtual kittens, managed to sell one of their CryptoKitties for a whopping $140,000. Future applications could include using this technology to facilitate secure in-game payments and purchases.

Social Gaming

Social interactions within online games have always been one of their key features. It is no small feat to connect thousands of players in one gaming world via chat, and the future has more in store for how social interactions work within these virtual worlds. One genre that has benefitted the most from this aspect is online gambling games. An article on Hacker Noon points out how online gambling platforms are adding more features that focus on social interaction, such as friends lists and chat rooms. Specifically, poker platforms are starting to focus more on the social aspect of gaming to attract more players. Case in point, PPPoker’s LinkedIn profile highlights how their platform emphasizes this social aspect by allowing players to customize their own tournaments, invite friends, and even create their own clubs. This customization combined with the social aspect of the genre make the games even more enjoyable to play. That being said, players can expect better ways to communicate in-game, across all genres, in the near future.

Augmented Reality

Lastly, augmented reality (AR) has seen an uptick in the last couple of years mainly due to the success of Pokémon Go. While it was initially seen as a fad, it quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Pokémon Go has been downloaded over 800 million times resulting in around $2 billion in revenue. Because of the game’s success, a slew of AR features followed on games such as Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Minecraft Earth. With the 5G-technology rollout, AR gaming is set to get even bigger thanks to the increased bandwidth and speed gamers will have access to.

I Built an Evil Genius Sign for Halloween

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of Warner Brothers cartoons. My sister and I were basically raised on this stuff, and so much of our cultural reference points (and humor) comes from watching Bugs Bunny when we were growing up.

So, as Halloween approached, I thought it might be cool to recreate an iconic image from the 1952 cartoon “Water Water Every Hare”, where Bugs is taken to a big scary castle on the edge of a waterfall. The castle is inhabited by, naturally, an Evil Scientist, who advertises the fact with a blinking sign on the towers of his castle.

Okay, I’m not really a scientist, I’m an engineer, but I figure I could apply a little artistic license and make a sign like that for my house for Halloween.

I wanted it big enough so I could put it in an upstairs window and have it visible from the pathway. We get a LOT of kids through our community over Halloween, and tons of parents as well (since mostly the parents would get the reference), so it needed to be visible. In order to constrain the glare, I decided to put it in basically a shadowbox configuration. An enclosed box, LED lighting inside, with a cutout pattern on front that would show the text.

First step was to use the laser cutter at the Makerspace to cut out the lettering. As anyone who does stencils will recognize, the second line (“BOO”) would have floating elements in it, and would have to be glued down after the box was made.

I found some old acrylic sheeting that still had one strip of white backing on that, and that made a dandy diffuser, as well as a place to mount the center parts of the lettering.

Next, based on the size of the lettering, I whipped up a box out of some scrap wood, and painted it black. I also painted the letter stencils so the shadowmask wouldn’t show up at night, but the lettering shining through would.

The colored lighting was done with some LED strips and an arduino. The sketch was painfully simple. Just first row on, wait a second, off, wait a half second, second row on, wait a half second, off, then wait a half second and then repeat. The most challenging part was soldering up the strips (I needed 3 rows), and mounting the arduino.

The only thing I had to go ‘buy’ was the backing board. A quick trip to Michaels got me a sheet of the plastic corrugated ‘cardboard’ for $4. This stuff is awesome, and I think I’m going to use it more in future projects. I mounted the LED strips and the arduino to it initially using hot glue, but while that’s the default ‘go to’ for DIY projects, I ended up ziptying the strips to the backing board, and doing the same for the arduino. Since the board is flexible, hot glue just didn’t make sense.

Once everything was screwed together, it was just a matter of putting it in the window and plugging it in. Yay! It worked!

I slightly misjudged the width of the window, so it doesn’t quite have the margins I had hoped, but when it got dark, it looked great. Very happy with the end result!