CronoTriggerfan wrote:The creation of video games has always been in the hands of the technical elite; programmers, 3D modelers, developers, etc.
I don't think this is an accurate assessment.
Sure, it was true in the 70's, and it apparently continued to be true at Atari for quite a while in the 80's, but non-technical people have been quite present in video game creation and design for decades.
Shigeru Miyamoto was an artist before he began designing video games. Roberta Williams' technical abilities were pretty much limited to drawing those crappy graphics you see in "Mystery House". Even the guy who created Pac-Man was not a technical guy.
Available technology, games' reputation as children's toys, and the early dominance of "arcade-style" gaming are what has prevented more complex stories from being told in earlier decades. Designers were often not technical people themselves, but all of their ideas had to be scaled to be realizable on available media. The one place technology was sufficiently advanced, the arcade, was not a good media for a deep story because play time was essentially leased in very short chunks.
But no, I don't really see any major changes to the industry that haven't already happened regarding game design. By its very nature, there will always have to be some technical considerations mixed into the creative process, just as there is in film and painting. Major games will continue to be designed following the formula that has worked in the past unless a new method that tends to yield higher profits turns up.
I don't have a very good track record on predicting the future, though.