The Fall Videogame Lineup

FOR video game players the summer begins after Labor Day. The preceding months have the prestige titles and the intriguing independent projects. In that category 2012 has served up Dear Esther, Fez, Journey and Papo & Yo, to name a few. The fall is the time for blockbusters, many of them sequels with big explosions.

The biggest sequel coming soon is the Wii U, Nintendo's follow-up to the original Wii. The Wii U's main selling point is a new touch screen controller that is something like an iPad with thumbsticks and buttons. In demonstrations for the news media Nintendo has shown off games that permit what it calls “asymmetrical” competition, in which the player using the Wii U game pad sees something different on the touch screen than the rest of the players, using traditional Wii controllers, see on the television.

In one such game, Luigi's Ghost Mansion (part of the coming anthology Nintendo Land), the touch screen player controls a ghost that is invisible to the remaining players. In another title slated for a 2012 release, New Super Mario Bros. U, the player using the touch-screen controller can add new platforms into the game world, either to assist inexperienced players or to frustrate less-well-liked opponents. Nintendo has also been showing off games, like ZombieU, that are designed to appeal to people who dismiss the Wii as a family-friendly device for casual players. (And yes, that is exactly what so many other people liked about the Wii in the first place.)

If the Wii U delivers as advertised, Nintendo will have once again expanded the universe of the possible for video game players. So far there's no release date, other than a pledge that the Wii U will arrive sometime this year.

Here are some other titles worth watching out for. Not every last one of them has a number at the end of the title.

BORDERLANDS 2 The sequel to an unexpected hit that some critics regarded as the best game of 2009 lands this month. Shooting, looting and customized skill trees combine for a genre-bending shoot 'em up that the developer calls a “role-playing shooter.” (Gearbox, Sept. 18; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC.)

RESIDENT EVIL 6 Video game nomenclature is a tricky thing. This is actually the eighth Resident Evil game. The actual sixth one (Resident Evil 4, naturally) is often cited as one of the finest video games ever created. That's a lot to live up to. (Capcom, Oct. 2; Xbox, PS3, PC.)

DISHONORED Not a sequel! A supernatural assassin can possess fish and rats (and people) to sneak into places and find his targets. A nonlethal solution is supposed to be available for every contract too. The most intriguing original fiction of the next four months. (Arkane Studios, Oct. 9; Xbox, PS3, PC.)

FABLE: THE JOURNEY The fourth full-size Fable game will require people to use the Kinect, Microsoft's your-body-is-the-controller technology, to play: hurling lightning bolts and fireballs with the right hand, blocking melee attacks with the left hand. Hard-core gamers are skeptical that Kinect is useful for anything other than family-friendly party games, pretty much the same thing they think of the Wii. The new Fable is Microsoft's chance to prove them wrong. (Lionhead Studios, Oct. 9; Xbox.)

ASSASSIN'S CREED III Really the fifth title in the Assassin's Creed series, which features an incomprehensible science fiction plot involving conspiracies and secret societies, set against astonishing re-creations of historical settings (past examples include 12th-century Jerusalem, Renaissance Italy and 16th-century Constantinople). The new game introduces a half-Mohawk, half-European figure who will roam the colonial American frontier and visit models of 18th-century Boston and New York. (Ubisoft, Oct. 30; Xbox, PS3, Wii U, PC.)

NEED FOR SPEED: MOST WANTED The 19th - yes, 19th - release in the long-running car-racing franchise is part social network, part game, in a city with Boston-inspired architecture. (What is it about Boston this year?) One example of how it works: Do the longest jump through billboards plastered through the game, and you can plaster your face inside your friends' game worlds - until they do better, when they can return the favor. (Criterion Games, Oct. 30; Xbox, PS3, PlayStation Vita, PC.)

HALO 4 Master Chief, the character who launched a million Xboxes, is in the hands of a developer other than Bungie, the studio that created him, for the first time. Is 343 Industries - owned by Microsoft, like Bungie before it - up to the task? And no, this isn't the fourth Halo game. It's the seventh. (343 Industries, Nov. 6; Xbox.)

CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2 The ninth Call of Duty game - but legitimately the second Black Ops game - moves the franchise into the near future, with a plot that moves from the 1980s to 2025 in cold war hot spots like Panama and Afghanistan. For the first time Call of Duty will have a branching story line with multiple endings, and there will be multiple paths to the objectives within the game. The multiplayer suite is typically ambitious: a new “e-sports” mode will attempt to bring competitive league gaming to home consoles, and another mode allows people to broadcast their play-by-play of other people's multiplayer matches. Who will emerge as the Vin Scully of Call of Duty? (Treyarch, Nov. 13; Xbox, PS3, Wii U, PC.)

FAR CRY 3 Genuinely the third title in the Far Cry series, this game doesn't have the political ambition of its predecessor. But it looks as if it has a vibrant island setting, teeming with tigers and bears and water buffaloes that can be turned against you, or your enemies. (Ubisoft, Dec. 4; Xbox, PS3, PC.)

Valve, the Game Maker Without Rules

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Animators and artists at Valve. The company tries to foster unorthodox thinking by having no traditional management structure.

THIS is no Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

Every way I look, the scene shifts, the battle unfolds. I have a crazy contraption strapped to my head: a boxy set of goggles that looks like a 22nd-century version of a View-Master. It immerses me in a virtual world. I whirl one way and see zombies preparing to snack on my flesh. I turn another and wonder what fresh hell awaits.

Behold the future of video games. Or at least the future as envisioned by a bunch of gamers, programmers, tinkers and dreamers at the Valve Corporation here. This is the uncorporate company that brought us the Half-Life series, the hugely influential first-person shooter game.

The Valve guys aren't done yet. Founded 16 years ago by a couple of refugees from Microsoft, Valve makes games that wild-eyed fans play until their thumbs hurt and dawn jabs through the curtains. But what really makes Valve stand out is its foresight on technology.

A decade ago, long before every media executive figured out that downloading was the future, Valve started an online service, Steam. It has since become for games what iTunes is to music - a huge online distributor, in its case one with more than 40 million active users and that, by some estimates, accounts for about 70 percent of the PC games bought and downloaded from the Web. Through Steam, Valve effectively collects a toll on other companies' online game sales, in addition to making money from selling its own products.

On Monday, the company will begin a public test of a new television-friendly interface, Big Picture, for buying Steam games and playing them on computers in the living room.

 “They're on the cutting edge of the future of this industry,” says Peter Moore, the chief operating officer of , a big games publisher that is both a Valve competitor and partner.

Now Valve executives think they may be onto the next big thing in games: wearable computing. The goggles I'm wearing - reminiscent of the ones Google recently unveiled to much hoopla - could unlock new game-playing opportunities. This technology could let players lose themselves inside a virtual reality and, eventually, blend games with their views of the physical world.

It's one thing if a bottomless money well like Google wants to sink its profits into Project Glass, its own wearable-computing initiative. But for a 300-person software company like Valve, developing eyeball computers seems an absurdly ambitious - some say foolish - enterprise.

Valve's exploration of new forms of game hardware comes as the PC, the device on which it has depended for much of its history, is changing in ways that could undermine its business. With a new PC operating system, Windows 8, coming out in October, Microsoft will start its own online marketplace for distributing software, including games. The move could take some of the, well, steam out of Steam.

Valve fosters unorthodox thinking through a corporate culture unusual even by the quirky standards of technology companies. While many start-ups pay lip service to flat organizational structures, Valve emphasizes that its workplace is truly “boss-less.”

“We don't have any management, and nobody ‘reports to' anybody else,” reads Valve's handbook for new employees, which generated buzz this year when it leaked onto the Web.

Forget silly-sounding Silicon Valley job titles like code jedi or chief listener. Valve has no formal titles. The few employees who've put titles on business cards do so to satisfy outsiders apprehensive about working with people without labels. The same applies to Gabe Newell, one of Valve's founders.

“I think he's technically the C.E.O., but it's funny that I'm not even sure of that,” says Greg Coomer, a designer and artist who was one of Valve's first employees. (For the record, Mr. Newell is technically Valve's chief executive.)

To spur creativity, Google management created the concept of “20 percent time,” the portion of employees' schedules that they could commit to entirely self-directed projects. At Valve, it's more like 100 percent time. New employees aren't even told where to work in the company. Instead, they are expected to decide on their own where they can contribute most. Many desks at Valve are on wheels. After figuring out what they want to do, workers simply push their desks over to the group they want to join.

A few years ago, a Valve hire who had worked in special effects in Hollywood balked at wheeling his desk. The news reached Mr. Newell, who promptly picked up the desk himself and carried it to the new location, to the new employee's embarrassment.

The man, whom Valve declined to name, is no longer with the company.

In an interview in a conference room at Valve's headquarters, Mr. Newell says that relatively few people have left Valve over the years. When they do, it's often because a sick parent needs help. In one case, Valve moved an employee's parents to the Seattle area, where one of them was also able to receive better cancer treatment.

“I get freaked out any time one person leaves,” says Mr. Newell, a bearded bear of a man with John Lennon-style glasses. “It seems like a bug in the system.”

What Big Data Unleashes

TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.

Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism.

Michael R. Stonebraker, a pioneer in database research, is one of the optimists. Software used by companies and government agencies - in products sold by Oracle, I.B.M., Microsoft and others - descends from research done in the 1970s by Mr. Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a team of scientists at I.B.M.

Today, Mr. Stonebraker sees an opportunity for new kinds of ultrafast databases. The new software, he explains, takes advantage of rapid advances in computer hardware to help businesses and researchers find insights in the rising flood of data coming from so many sources, including Web-browsing trails, sensor data, genetic testing and stock trading.

So, at 68, Mr. Stonebraker is a co-founder and chief technology officer of two start-ups in the field of data-driven discovery, VoltDB and Paradigm4.

“Now is the time,” says Mr. Stonebraker, who is an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory. “The economics and the technology are ripe.”

The case for optimism is by no means unqualified. The march of these technologies raises social issues, including privacy concerns, and the timing is uncertain. All of the bold predictions in the 1990s that the Internet would disrupt traditional industries like media, advertising and retailing did come true - a decade later.

But a series of related technologies, scientists and entrepreneurs say, has reached a critical mass - come to a digital boiling point, so to speak - so that new products and capabilities become possible. The technical ingredients, they note, include powerful, low-cost computing and storage spread across thousands of computers. The digital engine rooms of Google and Amazon are prime examples.

Another fast-improving technology involves inexpensive and intelligent sensors, which are crucial to a new breed of automated machines like experimental driverless cars and battlefield drones. Clever software - notably machine-learning algorithms - animates much of the current wave of smarter technology. Two well-known examples are found in Watson, the “Jeopardy”-winning computer from I.B.M., and the movie recommendations on Netflix.

ADVANCES in such underlying technologies are fueling the current excitement in fields like artificial intelligence, robotics and data analysis and prediction. “All parts of the technology pipeline are gearing up at the same time, and that's how you get this explosion of new applications and uses,” says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University.

Behind the seeming explosion, experts say, is a process of technology evolution. Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster, compares the process to the evolutionary biology concept known as “punctuated equilibria” formulated by the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. The idea is that species often evolve in periodic spurts.

Yet, they say, there are typically years of progress before a commercial breakthrough in the technological realm.

“Even in Silicon Valley, it takes most technologies 20 years to become overnight successes,” says Mr. Saffo, a consulting professor at Stanford's school of engineering.

The Internet provides a case study of both technology's evolutionary progress and its exponential growth. In 1969, there were only four computers connected to the nascent Internet, compared with roughly a billion computing devices today, from laptops to cellphones, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.

The early increases in connected computers drew scant attention. “But at some point in the late 1990s,” Mr. Lazowska says, “you were going from 4 million to 8 million to 16 million to 32 million to 64 million, and people started to notice that something revolutionary was going on.”

Rocket Fuel is a four-year-old Silicon Valley start-up that uses artificial-intelligence software to place display advertisements for marketers on the Web. The company can not only tailor ads by demographic slices of viewers' ages, gender and interests, but can also use its predictive algorithms to produce campaigns based on results, says George H. John, the company's chief executive.

For example, a luxury carmaker might tell Rocket Fuel that it wants to place 100 million ads in the next month, and it will pay the company, say, $80 for generating a sales lead, as evidenced by a potential customer downloading a brochure or filling out an online form.

Rocket Fuel is growing fast, having nearly doubled its work force since the start of the year, to 240. So far in 2012, it has handled campaigns for more than 500 advertisers, including BMW, Duncan Hines, Allstate, Pizza Hut and Ace Hardware. It has raised $76 million in venture funding and debt, and its thousands of computers handle 19 billion bid requests a day on ad exchanges. Each online auction for ad space is typically completed in about 100 milliseconds, a tenth of a second.

Rocket Fuel, Mr. John says, is using some of the ideas he worked on in the 1990s as a doctoral student focusing on artificial intelligence at Stanford - research that was supported with government dollars from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, as is so often the case. In the last few years, building a business around those ideas has become achievable and affordable. “And a lot of it has to do with the underlying technology,” Mr. John says.

FOR Mr. Stonebraker, the hardware advance that opens the door to his start-ups is the striking improvement of solid-state memory, as performance climbs and prices plunge. Solid-state, or flash, memory is most widely known as the lightweight storage technology used in consumer devices like small music players and smartphones.

But increasingly, solid-state memory can be used in big computers, holding a hefty database in memory instead of sending data off to be stored on disk drives. According to Mr. Stonebraker, some data-handling tasks can now be completed 50 times faster than with conventional systems.

“Memory is the new disk,” he says. “The obvious thing to do is to exploit that technology.”

In the yin and yang of computing, it is software that exploits hardware, enabling a computer to do useful things. And machine-learning programs and other data-sifting software are advancing swiftly.

“There is no point in collecting and storing all this data if the algorithms are not able to find useful patterns and insights in the data,” says Mr. Kleinberg at Cornell. “But the software is scaling up to the task.”