The unfulfilled promise of Massively Interactive Live Events and where they go from here.
On May 6th, 1954, Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier. At the time, this represented a towering athletic achievement — one that runners had been seriously pursuing for more than 65 years.
Bannister’s story is often referenced as evidence of the power of mental models. Despite decades of prior attempts to break the four-minute barrier, it took just 46 days for another runner to follow in his footsteps. A year later, three more runners did it…in the same race! Once Bannister showed the world that a sub-four-minute mile could be run, other athletes could set their minds on greater challenges.
In the world of interactive entertainment, a different sort of “mile” has challenged developers with a similar mental barrier.
MILEs, or Massively Interactive Live Events, are a relatively new type of experience that promise interactive entertainment at unmatched scale. An offshoot of cloud gaming, MILEs offload heavy computation tasks (such as game physics, AI, and the like) from participants’ local devices and move them to the cloud. Meanwhile, MILEs utilize video streaming technology to deliver an interactive viewing experience with potentially massive concurrency.
