At last week’s DICE summit, speakers focused on a common theme: what’s next in games? Every speaker answered that question differently, with some trying to predict the future and others taking personal looks back to discuss how the evolution of their careers has shaped what they’ll do next. For me, the highlight came in the form of a conversation between Mark Cerny and Eugene Jarvis, which asked if we’re in “a renaissance of gaming” or if everything today is just more of the same.

Will games ever become “too” real?

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“ People don’t want to strap things on to themselves to be entertained in their home.

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“ Once things become closer to reality, and it’s so beautiful and enticing and you have the perfect storyline in there, would you ever want to leave?

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“ That’s insane. It’d be so intense that I don’t know if I could take it.

Jarvis -- creator of classics like Defender, Robotron 2084, and Smash TV -- and Cerny -- lead architect of the PlayStation 4 -- had an hour-long conversation, covering topics including how mobile gaming has changed the landscape, VR headsets, development costs, and much more. While they didn’t necessarily have all the answers, the two men offered crucial, fascinating insight into how things can still change, all from the perspective of people who have seen the industry grow from the beginning into what it is today.Inspired by that talk, I spoke to Cerny as well as developers who worked on Gone Home, Tearaway, and The Last of Us in a series of separate interviews throughout the summit. Here’s what they think might be coming next.As technology evolves, developers are finding new ways to make games more immersive. Oculus Rift feels more real than ever thanks to updated hardware, and Sony is rumored to be working on a headset as well. As hardware improves, will a player ever be able to feel like they’re fully immersed in the world of a game, and will that make the experience “too real” to enjoy?“Let’s say that there was some method of feeling like, ‘whoa, I’m actually inside of this virtual space.’ I am dubious about that being what people actually want,” Gone Home’s Steve Gaynor told us. “There are these things that are reaching to fill the gap between, ‘I’m looking at something on a screen and suspending my disbelief by concentrating on it,’ and ‘I’m literally on a holodeck that I cannot tell is not a real place.’ The territory between those two points, like the visual uncanny valley representing humans, has rapidly diminishing returns, and then spirals out to characters that are so lifelike that their creators can’t predict what they’re going to do, or that you can literally interact with them in any way you would interact with an actual human in the room. What you reach for is that.”“Given where we’re at right now, I think we don’t need to worry too much about getting too real,” Cerny said. “It’s very exciting to see the attention that VR is getting. Not just because of the entry into the virtual worlds, but also because of the emphasis it puts on low latency and responsiveness. Those are keys to game creation that sometimes we can drift away from when we’re making a game. We can say, ‘well, it runs at 20Hz, but it’s a cinematic experience, and the cutscenes are very pretty.’ The truth is, if you’re running at 20Hz with a traditional engine, the latency that you’re looking at between hitting a button and seeing something on your screen can get as high as 150 milliseconds. VR doesn’t fix that problem as much as VR focuses you on addressing latency issues, because the feeling that you’re in a virtual world relies on extremely low latency. You need to turn your head and see immediate responsiveness.”“I think that with the VR technology, it could be really interesting, but it does mean that you are essentially always making a first-person experience of some kind,” Tearaway creative lead Rex Crowle added. “There are some fun experiments. I love that one where you can play old LucasArts games on a computer in an ‘80s house. But personally, I’m not so interested in making first-person experiences. But being able to just turn a coffee table there into a little living, breathing space with little creatures running around in it, I’m throwing pretzels in and they’re eating them? [Something like] that would be pretty cool.”“It’s a long ways off, I think, until you actually plant the chip in there and it’s in your brain,” The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley said, “but when it’s there, and it’s going to get there at some point, that’s when it’s going to get super scary, right? But even the Oculus Rift, or any kind of VR device, is interesting. We’ve talked about, ‘dude, wouldn’t it be rad to be in the world of The Last of Us?’ Using audio cues like binaural sound, so I get the sense that somebody’s behind me, or I hear the footsteps or a bottle clank, and you actually get to look around the environment? That’s insane. It’d be so intense that I don’t know if I could take it. So I don’t know where this whole thing is going.“The scary thing is, you already see people getting addicted to something like World of Warcraft,” The Last of Us creative director Neil Druckmann added. “And that world is in a lot of ways pretty crude compared to reality. Once things become closer to reality, and it’s so beautiful and enticing and you have the perfect storyline in there, would you ever want to leave? I’m sure we’re going to have a new set of addictions as far as people playing this kind of stuff.”