The future of gaming: It’s now

(CNN) – The future of video gaming is bright, according to four industry visionaries who spoke at a recent gaming event.

Kellee Santiago, Ken Levine, Paul Barrett and Mark DeLoura were part of a panel discussion at the opening of a new Smithsonian exhibit, The Art of Video Games. Each has been successful in the gaming business and has great hope for what’s to come.

Barrett, the senior creative director for BioWare-Mythic, said people who are going to make games in the future are playing them right now. He describes this time in those gaming lives as their Golden Age.

“What’s interesting about my Golden Age is it is where I learned my prejudices about what games I liked and I don’t like,” Barrett said. “That period defined my understanding of games so that when I had the chance to make games, those are the kinds of game I wanted to make.”

For the gamers of today, he said, “The current Golden Age is pretty bloody good.”

Others on the panel said they were also driven to create games that reflected or expressed something they wanted to share with others. For Levine, the creative director of the ”BioShock” franchise, it is about creating worlds and telling stories that mean something in those worlds.

He related a story about the creation of ”BioShock,” where players can save or sacrifice young girls, known as Little Sisters, to gain power. In the beginning of the creative process, the little girls were sea slugs.

“In order for the story to be meaningful, we had to create empathy between the player and the thing they were making a decision about,” Levine said. “That took a while for that to come about. The actual choice became simple — what do you want to do with this little girl?”…

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