Living in an Augmented Reality

In his keynote at AGDC, Bruce Sterling pushed the idea that in the future, all games will be AR games.  His premise of coming back from the future as a student sent by his older self, to talk about the industry in 2043 (35 years from now) is a bit trite, but how can I argue with the observation that

And the games of 2043? “They’re not the kind of games that were developed for flat glass screens — cumbersome,” he said. “We don’t pretend that a flat glass screen is a window into a virtual world… the idea sounds silly to us.”

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’ but we don’t,” Sterling continued. “We think that reality is real — you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface.” To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal “body games” to global games and space games and everything in between — including “neighborhood games”. More importantly, “[In 2043] we’ve got 70 years of computer games — that’s what we’ve got that you don’t have — and we got it from you. All kinds of dead intellectual properties and platforms, all being continually re-released.” 

It sounds like it was a bit of a light, motivational talk, but it seems everyone is getting the AR bug these days.