Cinema will be alive and well in 2025, but film may be dead. Donald Clarke considers how we will entertain ourselves in 20 years
Undeterred by the fact that civilisation was not propelled into anarchy by Britney's tube top, Little Richard, the Charleston or any of the other threats to society pointed up by newspaper columnists through the years, today's nervous parents are getting themselves in a tizzy about violent video games and, in particular, the extraordinary Grand Theft Auto. This, you will remember, is the game which allows you to wander about lawless inner-city streets slicing prostitutes' windpipes, reversing over old ladies and setting fire to ambulances. But what is really disturbing about the game is the way it inflicts two layers of guilt upon those playing it.
So, what new forms of digital misery will we be inflicting on ourselves in the year 2025? Will we be taking video games in pill form? Will pornography be delivered via adhesive patches?
The first thing to say is that, whatever you may hear from commentators in the interim, one particular entertainment medium will surely still be with us. When television arrived in the 1950s, it was supposed to spell the end for cinema. Further premature obituaries were written when video came along. Home computer games inflicted another not-so-fatal blow in the 1980s and 1990s. But, like Rasputin careering about St Petersburg full of bullets and poison, cinema stubbornly refuses to die. As long as teenagers need a big, dark room in which to surreptitiously investigate one another's underwear, movie houses will have a purpose. And, however huge home cinemas become, they will never quite be able to deliver a bus the size of a bus.
But, though cinema will be alive and well, film may be dead. The use of digital media in the making of movies is already commonplace; the next step will be the introduction of digital projection systems. Such an advance will see expensive, cumbersome rolls of film replaced by compact, easy-to-replicate units. But, as these advances mainly benefit distributors rather than exhibitors, it has proved difficult to persuade the multiplexes to invest in the new equipment and, accordingly, there are currently only 250 digital projectors in US cinemas.
Last month the UK Film Council, eager to open cinemas up to the freedoms that the new technology offers, announced that it was offering government funds to facilitate the changeover in Britain. Though all right-thinking film-goers have an affection for the celluloid itself, one must acknowledge there is an irresistible force at work here.
So, what will the new projection systems be showing us? The cinema is over 100 years old, but no new genre of any significance was invented after the coming of sound. The great movies of 1925 included Ben Hur, The Lost World and The Phantom of the Opera. The big films of 2004 included Troy, The Day After Tomorrow and, ahem, The Phantom of the Opera. Scrunch up your eyes a little and the movies of 2025 may look very like those of a century earlier.
But entertainment in the home will certainly have changed. The format battles currently simmering over second-generation DVDs - Toshiba's HD-DVD is squaring up against Sony's Blu-Ray system - will probably seem as irrelevant as the War of the Spanish Succession by 2025. The availability of juicily powerful broadband and huge hard-disk capacity should, by then, allow us to transfer everything - films, music, games, happiness, faith - directly from the supplier's computer into our own, without having to touch any shiny little beer-mats.
For these changes to have their full effect, consumers will need to get used to the idea of their computer and their TV being in the same box. "The future of television is on the PC - not the TV. It's not a matter of if; it's a question of when," Ron Whittier, senior vice-president of Intel's Content Group, announced way back in 1997. Microsoft is currently pushing its Media Centre software, which allows users to connect their television to their computer and to download all kinds of tasty material. The problem, as Mr Gates's earthly representatives freely admit, is that, up till now, consumers have regarded the computer as something that sits in the bedroom or the office some way from the family hub. The young adults of 2025 will have grown up with the Internet and will think differently.
It is tempting to imagine the barriers between different home entertainment media breaking down. As TV becomes more interactive - why do so many news programmes feel the need to canvass opinions from their viewers? - and video games take on the look of high-budget films, one gets the sense of a series of streams merging into the same digital swamp. One of the reasons the final two Matrix films made so little sense was that several characters were carrying on parallel adventures in spin-off video games. The radio stations blasting from the stolen cars in Grand Theft Auto tend to be much more entertaining than those in what we still naively think of as the real world. We may be drifting towards a future where entertainment sources such as the Internet, video games and home movies, each of which will be delivered via the same electronic conduit into the same black box, will be thought of as one great, homogenous mass of fun.
In some ways, this meta-media will keep us together. Minor celebrities will continue to use computers to set up humiliating reunions with former class-mates who have gone on to become brush salesmen and lollipop ladies. Those fluent in Klingon, but inarticulate in the language of romance, will still be able to set up formerly improbable liaisons.
But what of the increasingly sophisticated world - or "Worlds" - of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games)? Such games see uncountable multitudes of players, each of whom could be anywhere on the planet, moving about alternate universes in the guise of various elves, goblins and warlocks. So obsessive have players already become that particularly desirable weapons, spells, and insignia - all just whorls of software remember - sell for thousands of (real) dollars in virtual marketplaces. One can't help but think that the tentative emotional connections made while slaying a griffin of recent acquaintance are rendered no more meaningful by the knowledge that the beast is controlled by a lonely engineering student in Vancouver.
Such communication keeps players from the world rather than propelling them into it. Nightmare vistas open up of millions of tiny apartments in which single folk - whose sole sexual excitement comes via damp, horribly contoured descendents of the mobile-phone sex toys which began to emerge last year - spend hours chatting to dead-eyed mythical beasts without ever thinking to ask what human drives them.
The most attractive aspect of a role-playing game is not the violence or the pageantry; it is the hitherto unattainable sense of being translated into another being's psyche.
Anybody who has played the popular game The Sims, in which punters lead virtual humans through their daily lives, will have a good understanding of this. After several hours making sure that the little fellows have got to work, been to the lavatory and mowed the lawn, a terrifying realisation sometimes strikes: you are vicariously living a life considerably more boring than your own. By 2025, when we will feel actual shooting pains as the Sims have cardiac arrests, we may have given up on our own external existences altogether.
But human beings are reassuringly stubborn in their tastes. A thousand years after PlayStationless peasants first began kicking bladders at tree stumps, Association football remains as popular as it has ever been. The generation whose parents despaired at the way television was destroying literature have grown up to see their own children poring over the adventures of J.K. Rowling's juvenile wizard. In 2004, a quarter of a century after Come Dancing was lasta talking point, the BBC's biggest ratings winner was a new version of the show fronted by some callow youth named Bruce Forsyth. It seems quite possible that in 2025 we will be enjoying a revival of reality TV - to be declared dead in 2006 or so - fronted by that much-loved old biddy Davina McCall.
The hippie era was, despite the best efforts of the punks, followed not by anarchy, but by Reaganism, Thatcherism and vulgar consumption. If Dad spends his evenings slicing prostitutes' windpipes, reversing over old ladies and setting fire to ambulances (and dads of my acquaintance do) then you can be sure his kids, motivated by the amphetamine that is adolescent contrariness, will seek a life pressing wild flowers, climbing mountains and writing epic verse.