It’s not clear yet what Bobby Kotick’s role will be longer term when Microsoft finalizes its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but currently he just seems to be doing…whatever he wants, including an extremely weird town hall meeting he just had with employees.
The meeting was hosted by James Corden, yes, that James Corden, and Kotick covered all manner of topics including the potential return of Guitar Hero, which he believes is only possible with the newfound Microsoft money. We’ll uh, see how that pans out I guess.
Then Kotick really goes some places. When discussing the future of gaming, Kotick went well beyond ideas like VR or the metaverse and name-checked Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a chip that lets you control and interact with devices with your mind, as where he thinks gaming is actually going at some point:
“I think you’ll see things like Neuralink, you’ll actually be able to interact with things on the screen, where there isn’t a controller,” Kotick said, qualifying this may mean a headset, earpiece, or “other type of sensor.”
In September, a Wired article contradicted Musk’s defense of Neuralink, where he said that no monkeys that had been used for testing had been killed by the device. Here’s a reported excerpt from a 2019 test:
“Animal 15 began to lose coordination and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”
Musk also said that he chose monkeys “close to death” to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, but that was also disputed by the report.
And now, Neuralink is gearing up for human trials! You can go on ahead and visit this recruitment page to try to apply for the brain chip. Here’s how that will work:
“During the study, the R1 Robot will be used to surgically place the N1 Implant’s ultra-fine and flexible threads in a region of the brain that controls movement intention. Once in place, the N1 Implant is cosmetically invisible and is intended to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention. The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.”
The stated goal of Neuralink is not the ability to play video games with your mind, it’s the more noble objective of trying to help people with dehibiltating conditions. But actual, practical application of the device remains elusive, as these human trials are only just starting now, and clearly some of the monkey trials may have been…a touch problematic.
As for Kotick’s asserting about gaming with Neuralink or other devices, I’m not sure what time scale he’s talking about here. Currently, we can barely convince a fraction of the gaming population to even put on VR goggles for any length of time. Gesture and motion controls have come and gone and mostly failed. Everyone keeps coming back to their good old controllers and mice and keyboards. Going from that to…a surgically implanted chip to control games is something I’ll say we may get around to in, I don’t know, let’s say they year 2120. I’m only half joking.
As for Kotick’s future, as much as he may be disliked by the general gaming public, there’s likely no path ahead for him where things don’t work out rosily. Either he stays on at Activision under Microsoft and makes tons of money, or he leaves and gets tons of money. This is of course in addition to the tons of money he already has. So if Kotick wants to hire James Corden to sit around and ask him about Guitar Hero and mind-controlled video games, he’s going to do just that.
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