A post covid world
There has a been a steady shift over the last few years to ever-present digital environments and nowhere has this been felt more than in gaming. Entire worlds and communities exist as purely digital and year on year more people are engaging across all demographics. The challenge for designers is how can we create a space to bring this digital world into the physical.
This is an interesting parallel with those of us working from home, where our work is now conducted almost all remotely so we find ourselves in a very similar situation, where we all exist in a digital community and are all looking at how we can adapt our physical environments to create a place people want to return to.
During the lockdown there has been a fascinating merging of sectors looking to gaming & Esports as a way to bridge the digital and physical, particularly the retail and entertainment sectors. People are using this time as an opportunity to test out new ideas and digital experiences. From a gaming perspective, as the industry has scrambled to take advantage of the lockdown, there have been some amazing new experiences that have emerged. The F1 has set up F1 Esports Virtual Grand Prix series, where real F1 drivers will race online against each other for each track that is missed during the lock-down, which will bring an enormous amount of exposure to that gaming platform. Another example was the new Christopher Nolan block buster film; Tenet, that ran its latest trailer in Fortnight ahead of its general release as the normal distribution platform of Cinemas are not available.
The interesting part of both examples is that the marketing departments of big businesses are fully embracing the scale and importance of digital environments and the ever-expanding communities that are growing inside them. They are also aimed at engaging with a younger audience who are growing ever more disconnected with the traditional methods of watching sports and films, due to escalating ticket costs and so many different platforms to watch with phones, tablets anywhere and anytime.
One of the side effects of having predominantly digital experiences is the next generation of media savvy users will become used to the rapid speed within which digital change happens. This presents a challenge for designers of the physical spaces that we want to design to encourage the communities to adopt.
As an example a traditional stadium design needs to last anywhere between 25-50 years once completed, and on top of this takes years to get planning, finance and eventually build. Alongside this the stadiums also already need to be flexible enough to adapt to new events and requirements every 3-5 years. It therefore becomes an impossible challenge to predict what esports will become over the next 5-10 years, so embracing flexible spaces is the key.
