Ok, so that last post was somewhat too “bloggy” – trying to be quippy & clever with limited substantiation. And this post will also be slightly unhelpful, as I’m slightly too tired to find the source links, and its been two weeks since I wrote the original post… but:

Ajax: a web technology that allows web applications to respond asynchronously, and thus look a bit more like traditional thick-client applications. Also means that sections of applications can load in real time – like map segments in Google maps.

Apply this to gaming, with high speed broadband, and you could have MMORPGs that load dynamically. Get yourself a thin-client machine with enough RAM and you could have some high performance computing, with only a limited rendering engine stored on disks. The reason that Nintendo came into this vision of the future is that their Revolution console will allow Abandonware to be downloaded to it – but as it doesn’t have a hard drive (copy protection), these old games will have to reside in some limited solid state flash memory or volatile RAM — possible for small, old games. But for photorealistic, cool, modern games? Something else would be needed…

So: is that what consoles will look like in the years to come? Games will be sold as rendering engines only, and live as they are updated dynamically off servers, delivered via ultra-fast, seeded P2P broadband networks?

Probably not. But I thought it was an interesting idea…