 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
| Pojo's Yu-Gi-Oh! news, tips, strategies and more! | |||||
|
|
|||||
 |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
Card Game Featured Writers Releases + Spoilers Anime Video Games Other
Magic
This Space |
 |
Baneful's Column
Yu-Gi-Oh! - 50 Years From Now
Predicting technology is hard to do accurately and
successfully. 15
years ago, the idea of a telephone with a screen for video
calling sounded like an amazing idea that everyone would buy
and fix to their wall.
I'm sure a lot of us imagined it would take a lot of
time for this to happen.
For a while, computers have had this as free apps like Skype
and Oovoo. And
people don't use it nearly as much as we may have predicted.
Out of left-field was the idea that cell phones could
do almost every practical function known to humanity.
Yeah, technology is tough to predict for sure.
Sometimes I think of what YGO will be like in 50 years.
Or perhaps framing this more appropriately, what it
would've been like had it been created 50 years from now.
I'm 50/50 on whether this game will be able to
survive a half-century longer.
In fact it may, but it will have to take on an
entirely new meaning.
Heck, every 5 years I say the game is dead and it
keeps living.
So, I'm not even going to predict an end date.
50 years from now, who knows how much Starter Deck Yugi (1st
edition) will cost on eBay.
These cards could very well be a vintage collector
item to bring back nostalgic memories.
Holograms
First things first.
What about holograms?
Maybe YGO will play exactly like it did on the anime.
Okay, well, the duel disk thing didn't pan out so
well. And pain
sensors to zap you when you take life point damage, as
strangely appealing as they would be, would result in way
too many lawsuits.
With the hologramed performance of Tupac Shakur (this is
ironically the second time I mention him in my column) a
runaway success, this could very well be a good start.
Having to make holograms for thousands of cards
though would be a serious logistical issue.
Especially having to make 100 new ones every 4 months
when a new booster set comes out.
And by the time we have this technology available,
YGO probably won't be popular, so we can only hope that in
50 years from now, a handful of college kids can make this
in their spare time.
It's a romantic dream, but a logistical nightmare.
Finding A Niche
I think a change of technology thus far has certainly made
card games less appealing.
This is not unlike the decline of board games
(seriously, I see barely anybody still playing games like
Monopoly).
Video-game consoles have become more advanced and
tablets/phones satisfy people's hunger for gaming on-the-go.
Years ago, screens, computers and portable devices could not
represent the aesthetics of fantasy through an interactive
medium effectively.
Physical cards, dice and boards were much more
suitable. It
would deeply sadden me, to be honest, if there was a day to
come where all human social interaction is removed from a
card game.
Cardfight Vanguard, created recently, is doing quite well.
It is a niche game though, and the prospects of a
recently created game flourishing like YGO did is quite
slim.
In a sense, you could already call YGO a niche game because
it's well past the era where nearly every 10 year old boy
bought packs to collect the cards rather than to participate
in a meta game.
If YGO becomes more of a niche (which is very likely), it
will have more of a meta slant.
Over time, finding someone to play against could be very
hard. Card/comic
stores might abandon YGO tournaments for the next big thing.
Let's say there's only 10,000 YGO players in the
whole world instead of the (I'm assuming) hundreds of
thousands we have now, the odds of more than 5 of them
attending a local comic store would be slim.
Big tournaments wouldn't recoup enough to justify
their budget.
And you would only have a handful of friends to play against
in real life.
Most younger people will be into whatever trends are
available at that time.
So, it might be a game that old people play for
nostalgia sake, or it might make a revival and achieve cult
status. Very
much like the many high school kids out there who wear Led
Zeppelin and The Doors shirts.
Maybe it's a cultural comeback, or maybe, we as
parents (or parents-to-be) will tell our kids about YGO.
Otherwise, we'll have to rely on the internet to find
people around the world in every corner who want to play
YGO.
With video games, a problem that some older games with a
somewhat active niche fanbase (like maybe Unreal Tournament
for example) is that it will be dominated by very skilled
players. Very
few new people enter and the ones who do might find it
overwhelming and uncomfortable due to the disparity in skill
between them and the frequent users.
But since YGO is much more accessible and there is no
server with fixed rule, this problem can perhaps be easily
averted.
Whether it's phone/tablet apps and websites like
DuelingNetwork or an underground society of duelists
preserving their cards with intent to rebuild civilization
(a bit dramatic, much?), I am almost certain that the
tradition will carry on in some capacity.
- - -
(YGO 50 YEARS FROM NOW: Join the discussion on the
Pojo forums
here)
Contact:
banefulscolumn@gmail.com
|
|||
|
Copyright© 1998-2014 pojo.com This site is not sponsored, endorsed, or otherwise affiliated with any of the companies or products featured on this site. This is not an Official Site. |
|||||
