I was at my nephew’s home the other day and watched the kids play College Football 25 by EA Sports. The game was in glorious 4k and the players truly looked alive. The game play was incredible, using plays from the actual college playbooks. It boggles the mind to think how sophisticated the programming behind this game is. Videogames are a $100 billion industry, so I am sure EA Sports spent millions developing the title.
The Frostbite engine, which generates the incredible graphics and game play in EA Sports titles, is a far cry from the graphics of my first video game — Atari’s Pong. For the younger generation, this is a game where you play against your opponent by moving your paddle vertically, hitting a ball between your paddles without missing. It was in black and white. The paddle is a simple line. The ball is a pixel. Groundbreaking!
Soon after, we got Space Invaders, Centipede, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, and my personal favorite, Asteroid. The graphics at the time seemed amazing, with snappy game play, and now the games were in color! But watching the kids play the current crop of video games, it is no wonder they look at us with knowing eyes when we talk about the good old days of video games. For the current gamers, you can play 100 “classic” Atari games on your iPhone. The app had to dumb down the iPhone graphics for the games, but the experience mimics my memories from childhood.
During my ophthalmology residency, there were only 2 ways to treat ocular tumors: take out the tumor or radiate it. Like the explosion of drugs being tested in both dry and wet age-related macular degeneration, there are many drugs currently available in the clinic to treat various tumors. To explore and explain these exciting options, I asked Arun D. Singh, MD, director of ophthalmic oncology at the Cole Eye Institute and Taussig Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, to serve as the guest editor for our oncology issue. Dr Singh and other tumor experts explore the dramatic changes in the treatment landscape of ocular tumors. The sheer breadth of studies is amazing. From local to systemic therapies, and from photodynamic chemical reactions to surgeries, it is certainly an exciting time in the field.
In the future, the treatment of ocular tumors may even borrow from the gaming industry. VR techniques are already being developed to better visualize lesions on the treatment side and to distract patients during treatment to reduce their stress and anxiety. Like in games, the future software will blow our minds. RP
