14 DAY TRIAL // Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who is the developer of Rex and is now working on Child of Eden, has said that in his view video games have the potential to change the world we are living in and will change toward more sensory driven experiences to do so.
The developer has stated at a TEDx event in Tokyo that, “Games can change negative to positive,” adding, “When you play a game, from some disaster or someone’s attack on you, you have to change – better, better, all the time.”
But this positive effect can only happen as long as developers look at the real world for inspiration and create connections between the video game and real life phenomena.
Mizuguchi sees a future when advances in things like screen resolutions, input devices like motion tracking, feedback through things like vibrations will push the game industry past a threshold where it's hard if not impossible to distinguish between the virtual and the real.
The developer said, “Movies you can touch. Maybe you can join the TV show. Of course. it’s all possible. It’s soon all possible,” adding, “In the near future all games will be like a sense-o-rama.”
Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts has recognized the importance of video games and has allowed developers to apply for grants to cover some of the development and publishing costs.
Child of Eden is a shoot'em up that uses the Kinect motion tracking system as a control scheme and will have mechanics similar to those of Rez.
The player will need to take out enemies that appear on screen using two different modes.
The game will have five different levels and Child of Eden will be able to evaluate the performance of the player and chance things inside them depending on it.
Child of Eden is set to be launched on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft in June and the development team is also working on a version of the PlayStation 3 from Sony.