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The gaming world is evolving at an increasingly high speed. Developers come up with new ideas almost every week. The gaming industry is already immensely large (Beattie, 2021) and will grow even more. The question is, where can we find the gaming in about ten years? What will the future of gaming give us? This is a though question to answer but there are indications that will tell us in which direction the gaming industry will flow. 

The traditional gaming companies are being threatened by tech companies that all want a slice of the big, gaming industry pie. The tech industry is looking for ways to make video streaming as natural as streaming on Spotify or Netflix (Beattie, 2021). There are already numerous examples of this evolution like Facebook starting their own gaming platform and Google launching a cloud gaming service (Beattie, 2021). 

Beyond the upcoming competitiveness in the gaming industry, there are also a lot of technical innovations like for example virtual reality. There was already a hype about virtual reality a few years ago but this innovation has not lived up to its expectations yet. However, there are rumors that VR will be one of the most transformative tech trends of the coming years with ramifications to education and training (Marr, 2020). Another trend in the gaming industry is about the social side of gaming. People tend to look for social activities and don’t want to play alone anymore. A development that does look at the social side of gaming is Augmented Reality. AR ensures that people interact in reality with each other. The future of gaming is not only in a virtual reality room, but it lies surprisingly in complementing the reality (Miller et al., 2019).

We can conclude that there are many things possible in the upcoming years for the gaming industry. Which direction it will go remains a secret or now but there will be drastically changes in the near future. 

Sam Beekman

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/053115/how-video-game-industry-changing.asp

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/12/18/the-future-of-virtual-reality-vr/?sh=6d6d1e1e27be

[3] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216290

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Children are growing up with the internet more often than ever. In the past, a child used to draw at the table while the rest of the family was dinning. Nowadays, it is conventional that a child is using his (own!) iPad to connect with the world wide web. Young people are more connected than ever. This could be potentially a good thing because they are easily linked to each other and they’ll get a lot of knowledge, but this can also be a huge problem because they’re always exposed to a constant stream of information and there’s always the threat of cyberbullying (Jones, n.d.).

The biggest threat of the internet for young people is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is bullying with the use of digital technologies (UNICEF, n.d.). The effects of cyberbullying are disastrous, people can have the feeling of being attacked everywhere because it intrudes in their own house through their mobile phone, it seems like there’s no escape. In extreme cases, people don’t see another way out and take their own life.

It seems that the social media platforms do not care that much about cyberbullying because almost every platform has some kind of guidelines that doesn’t seem convincingly at all to tackle the problem of cyberbullying. More surprisingly, in the United States there’s even a law that prohibits platforms to get involved with the content on their platform (Milosevic, 2016).

Are there, thus, no solutions to this problem and do we have to accept that the next generation will have a lot of mental problems and are emotionally irritable? The answer is no, for the young people themselves, as for the parents there can be things done. It seems difficult, but for the young people it’s best to reach out for help. If you’re being bullied you can’t stop that yourself, even though there is always that feeling that you’d like to fix it on your own. The parents play a huge role in this. They should be very lucky if their child reaches out for help, and they must work with their child to tackle the problem by confronting the bully (Connectsafely, 2020).

The internet comes with a lot of new and interesting things and features but there are some flaws like cyberbullying amongst young people. This is a serious problem and the social media platforms are not trying to solve this problem. This is a challenge for the future, and this needs quite an effort from everyone that is involved in this problem.

References

Connectsafely (2020). Tips to help stop cyberbullying. https://www.connectsafely.org/tips-to-help-stop-cyberbullying/

Milosevic, T. (2016). Social media companies’ cyberbullying policies. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5164-5185. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/5320/1818

Jones, S. (n.d.). What is the real-world impact of online hate speech on young people?. https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/question/what-is-the-real-world-impact-of-online-hate-speech-on-young-people/

UNICEF (n.d.). Cyberbullying: What is it and how do we stop it? https://www.unicef.org/end-violence/how-to-stop-cyberbullying