Quicksay: The Ultimate Ultimate (Patreon)

Well, I was already writing about this topic and even planned to use Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as my example but since Sakurai recently brought it up, I suppose this is technically another reaction to his thoughts. In case you missed it, he recently discussed Ultimate and how it puts the series in an awkward position. Crucially, with Sakurai’s inside knowledge we now know that the reason Ultimate happened in the first place was because the development team stuck together between Smash Bros. titles for the first time. Sakurai has a better understanding of this situation than anyone and his opinion on the matter seems obviously true in the short term but in the long term I think it’s easily possible to imagine a new Smash Bros. game with more content, much more content in fact.

Before we go any further, I’m not talking about some AI content creation revolution, instead I’m talking about entropy. Although I’m not a physicist, it’s my understanding that the second law of thermodynamics is about the most inviolable law of the universe. Put simply, it states that energy spreads out over time. One consequence of this notion is that perpetual motion machines can’t exist so if you think you’ve found one, you’re fighting an uphill battle to say the least. It’s clear there are still things we don’t understand about the universe so when talking about the far future I don’t want to declare that certain things will always be impossible but in the here and now it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that entropy will only ever increase over time. This is a very relevant fact for games.

Are games still in their infancy? You might think this is an absurd or even insulting claim to make. Pac-Man is over 40 years old at this point and there were notable games even before that. We’re now up to the Playstation 5 and Playstation was absent from the earliest console generations. Even so, I think there’s a strong argument to make that games haven’t matured yet and won’t for some time to come because hardware is still improving. Even if hardware eventually stops improving, our energy generation still has the potential to skyrocket if certain breakthroughs happen. Cold fusion or an array of space-based solar collectors, imagine whatever utopian sci-fi vision you want here.

Roughly speaking, the limits of how much a game can simulate are a factor of these three components:

1. The efficiency of the hardware.
2. The efficiency of the software.
3. The amount of energy we’re willing to dedicate towards the game simulation.

Actually, the above would be a kind of best-case scenario because there may be limits to hardware which can’t be overcome. For example, processors are kept small for a reason, perhaps beyond a certain scale they can’t work fast enough for any further increase in total computing power. I won’t pretend I’m familiar enough with all of these intricacies to lay out specifics.

As you can probably guess, it’s the 3rd factor which I’m talking about here. A simple example would be this: Imagine you have a console or PC which has the best hardware we could ever create, the box is about as big as you would be willing to put up with and it consumes about as much power as you’d ever be willing to spend on playing games. Some of you might imagine a box which is a bit bigger than a large PC case whereas some of you might imagine a box as large as a room.  Likewise, some might imagine reasonable energy consumption to be 10 cents an hour where as some might be willing to pay 10 dollars a minute. Naturally there are even more extreme outcomes than these. Still, whatever you just imagined, it would be a hard limit, at least for you. At that point, games would no longer we able to “advance” the way they have been up until now.

Note that streaming is not a solution to this problem because the boxes still have to exist somewhere and they still take energy to run. It might allow a higher limit per person since there will only be some fraction of users logged in at any given moment but there’s still a limit. And there’s still a worst-case scenario of a big game release which causes a huge number of people to play at the same time.

In fact some version of this problem holds true, even if we imagine really utopian ideals. Let’s say humanity creates an array of solar panels encompassing the entire Sun. In other words, we become a Kardashev Type 2 civilisation. Can games still increase their graphic fidelity? Could we simulate individual atoms of a stone staircase being worn away as people walk over it for thousands of in-game years? Maybe. But would we? In such an energy-abundant future, would we expect human population to be the same as it is now? Probably not. There could be trillions of humans in the solar system alone. In that case, the energy will need to be split among many more people than exist today. It might still be an unimaginably generous limit compared to the people of today but it’s a limit all the same.

As long as entropy continues to increase, there will always be a reason to care about how we use our resources. Again, I’m not predicting this with 100% accuracy but it seems reasonable to assume that even if we have a huge supply of energy and perfect hardware, we will only be willing to use so much of that energy for the playing of games. Sooner or later, society will need to decide how much is enough for recreational purposes. Whether than happens in a hundred years or a hundred thousand years, it seems inevitable. There are a spectrum of outcomes available here depending on what that society looks like. Naturally, there might also be more than one society, each with different thresholds. For some, it could even be argued that games are too frivolous a use of energy at all which would be the Bad End in my eyes. Anyway, that’s for them to decide, I’ll just say that I love games and hope they get a fair share of energy and resources as long as we’re around.

Until we reach the limit, wherever it happens to be, have games really matured as a medium? In some ways they have but we’re still chasing graphical advancements which might be even more stifling than many realize. I think the Smash Bros. example helps make this clear. At some point there might never be another console. There might be a set of specs which are agreed upon to be the limit for a very, very long time. If there’s no new console coming along then there’s no need to rebuild Smash Bros. from the ground up every time. Games could theoretically be updated for hundreds of years with new content, all of which has top tier graphical quality. In that case, it’s pretty easy to imagine how Ultimate will ultimately be topped, at least in terms of content.

It’s interesting to consider what games might be like in a future where they can be updated more-or-less indefinitely. Even though the limits might be very far away, I’d say we’re getting some idea what that might look like today. World of Warcraft is nearly 20 years old, in a few years it’ll be halfway between Pac-Man and now. Let that one sink in. They recently announced three new expansions for it which will probably take it all the way to 2030 and beyond. It’s nine expansions deep already which is an enormous amount of content for one game. I think it’s pretty clear that its somewhat cartoony graphics are one reason its had so much staying power. Team Fortress 2, League of Legends and Fortnite all share this trait. There’s less pressure on them to release a new version because the graphics don’t need to be updated in that way. One day, the same might be true of every game. Of course I hope that the maturation of the medium doesn’t just mean enormously large and ever-growing games will be the only ones to exist but World of Warcraft could just be a taste of things to come.

I’ve recently become a little more sympathetic to the following generations which seem to favour live-service style games more than I personally might like. As many of us already know and the rest of us will one day find out, the passage of time doesn’t feel uniform across our lives. Some people speculate this is because each passing year takes up a smaller total percentage of our life so far and this causes us to feel that time is basically speeding up. Naturally, this acceleration is a little disconcerting but I can’t help but feel some pity for the way adolescents are currently experiencing time, at least with regards to games. 2023 has been an outlier in that there’s been many big releases to choose from but for the past decade the rate of releases in major series has been very, very slow, at least compared to the turn of the millennium. How does it feel to be a Zelda fan and yet have only two Zelda games release for your entire childhood? Even a year or two can feel like a very long time at that age so is it any wonder that they might be more interested in live-service games which see much more frequent content releases? It’s something to get excited about and surely they deserve that excitement just as much as I did.

Thankfully, everything I outlined in this post gives me reason to hope that the rate of releases can one day increase again and not just because the total number of people might increase. If graphics ever do reach an end point then asset libraries will make more sense. Developers will be able to settle into their tools, without worrying that everything will change in a few years. The tools themselves might be more abundant and more customized towards each genre or series. If there’s an art to design it’s about how you put the pieces together, when the pieces are abundant and easier to make, perhaps that’s when the art of design can really flourish.

As I’ve said before, I’m happy to live through this particular period of games history instead, I wouldn’t trade places just to see where it all goes. Even so, instead of arguing about which of our few decades so far has been the golden age, it seems more practical to assume we haven’t arrived there yet.