We zijn alweer belandt op de laatste dag van het jaar 2000, vandaag ronden we alles wat we dit jaar gedaan hebben af en beginnen we weer met een schone lijn. Iedereen kijkt vooruit op de toekomst, de een neemt goede voornemens, de ander bedenkt hoeveel jaarwi elingen hij of zij nog mee zal maken. Gamasutra nam ook een blik op de toekomst, maar dan op de game toekomst. You've seen the Web. Almost the entire planet is wired up. Everyone uses e-mail to talk to each other now, and even the telephone has changed. We're going mobile, even wearable – other services are arriving such as SMS, WAP, I-Mode, etc. Millions of people even have their own web page. We are all connected as equals in this world and we work and play together in harmony. It's one big global village and we're going to find ever more sophisticated ways of telling each other stories and having adventures together.

If you thought the five digit figures for players connected to online games was large scale, you're just seeing a MUD on steroids. Wait until you see an online world as large as the web, unfettered by bottlenecks caused by primitive client/server technology.

Everyone is gradually waking up to the fact that for an application to be of this global scale, it must be a distributed system. Consider file and resource sharing facilities such as Napster and MojoNation, tools such as NetZ, and games in development such as Atriarch. People are beginning to see that the future is distributed. Not everyone believes that global scale applications stopped with E-mail and the Web.

So, if you want to move on from small scale online games such as Ultima Online, Everquest and Asheron's Call, toward global scale virtual environments such as those depicted in movies such as The Matrix, Tron, and Dark City, then you're going to have to wrap your brain around the distributed systems approach.Het intere ante item is hier terug te vinden.