Video gaming has come a long way over the decades. During that time, new technologies have continually allowed developers to push the boundaries of what is possible and turn even more of their creative ideas into a reality.
Gaming can, therefore, be looked at as a majestic dance of creativity and technology, a coming together which produces some of the most popular and most immersive forms of entertainment available to humans today.
We, of course, know that this creativity is a product of humans. It’s one of the things that has allowed our civilisation to grow and develop as it has over millennia. However, the technologies that have had an impact on the gaming landscape are sometimes a little harder to see and quantify.
So, let’s explore which ones are the most important for the industry.
HTML5
Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML for short, is the “code” that is used to tell your computer’s web browser what to display when you visit a website.
It has evolved numerous times over the years with a series of minor and major upgrades that have introduced new features, including things we take for granted today like support for links to other pages, the inclusion of music and video, and improved abilities to style a website.
However, HTML5 was, by far, the biggest step forward for the gaming industry.
Players in their late 20s and above will remember when browser-based games used Macromedia/Adobe Flash. They were fun but they had big limitations and were prone to crashing or slowing down your computer.
HTML5 fixed this by removing the need for Flash entirely and allowing the browser to do all of the work itself.
While most players may not notice much of a difference in the behind-the-scenes element, it’s a major transformation and has allowed browser-based games to become bigger and more advanced while also making it possible to play them on mobile devices.
Digital Payments
Today, there are plenty of ways you can play games for free. Many mobile games, for example, operate on a free-to-play basis, allowing players to enjoy the bulk of the content without having to spend anything.
Similarly, many leading online casinos will offer incentives like a sign-up bonus that grants a certain number of free spins to use on slot games. These are often offered to new players to help them find their way around the casino’s software and explore the different gaming options.
However, not all games are free and players need a way to hand over their money to get access to the content they want to consume.
In the early days of gaming, this was almost exclusively done with physical cash, either by putting coins into an arcade machine or handing over some notes to purchase a cartridge, tape, or disc.
However, digital payment methods have helped to reshape not just the way we buy games, but the entire way they are designed and structured.
For example, instead of buying it upfront and getting access to the entire title, players now receive the core game and are offered the option of purchasing extra content in the form of levels, weapons, and skins.
Without instant transactions through credit/debit cards, payment wallets, and cryptocurrencies, these types of games would not exist today.
The Internet
Many of us take the internet for granted, but we should be a little more conscious of the benefits it has brought to our lives.
Among the many ways it makes living in the 21st century better is the fact that it has greatly improved gaming.
Firstly, having internet-connected gaming machines allows developers to push updates that fix bugs. While you may argue that this promotes a more lax approach to quality control, it prevents game-breaking glitches like the ones left in Driver 3 that make it impossible to complete the full set of levels.
The internet also allows players to compete against other people, be they in the same room, the same town, or on a completely different continent. This can make games more enjoyable for longer since humans can typically provide a greater and more varied challenge than the scripted “AI” characters which are controlled by the game itself.
Today’s games would simply not exist without the internet and nearly the entire industry now relies on it. You could, therefore, argue that this is the most important technology in modern gaming.