For the 1.4 billion strong global PC gaming community, gaming isn’t just a hobby but a way of life. It’s how they connect, cultivate a sense of community, enhance life skills like teamwork, sharpen their instincts, and earn a living. Passionate gamers revere and revel in the experience. Immersed in vivid virtual worlds, they find themselves free to unravel their identities and push the limits of their imagination.

Luckily for this group, and in large part because of their passion, the industry continues to step up with purpose-built technologies that fuel their fervor.

These are the four key areas enabling immersive gaming experiences.

Captivation

Games allow people to experience rich story arcs, role play as engaging characters and form long lasting friendships online. Research shows that Australia experienced a gaming boom last year, with 23 per cent of all gamers starting to play for the first time during lockdown in 2020. Fascinating visuals, ultra-realistic physics and sophisticated AI enables games to come to life in dynamic characters, objects, and weather elements. Innovations in computer resolution and performance are making these virtual worlds better year after year. CPU performance enhancements, great graphics and fast storage make players feel like they are stepping into an alternate universe.

Local Twitch streamer Taylor Morgan believes that, for the streaming community, captivation is all about audience engagement. It means “grabbing someone’s attention in a short period of time after they stumble onto your content and keeping that same engagement for years after”.

DrewD0g, a Facebook gaming creator, says streaming goes beyond just playing games online.

“It’s important to be captivating to my audience. People take time out of their day to watch me, so I think it’s important to stay engaging and keep them entertained. As much as I enjoy playing well on stream, I always focus more on my community in chat because engaging with them is what I enjoy the most.”

For Loserfruit, one of Australia’s most popular streamers, captivation means falling in love with characters and the story that only gaming provides.

“Not just single player, but the story that can be built even off a battle royale”, she says.

Technology is a key player in enabling these captivating experiences for both streamers and audiences. For instance, gaming laptops powered by 11th Gen Intel®️ Core™️ H-series processors unlock cutting-edge performance that enables more advanced simulations, more intelligent NPCs (non-player characters) and advances vast and engaging open worlds with more interactive objects. We see 4K graphics and ray-tracing effects starting to become mainstream in more and more games, and we are exploring how technologies like variable rate shading can provide smooth and consistent gameplay under these demanding gaming workloads.

Co-operation

Gaming is a social activity – and co-op games are all about effective collaboration, shared experiences and team building. While desktop setups are better for streaming or experimenting with mods, laptops powered with long-lasting battery life help you easily game from a friend’s couch or a coffee shop. With ever more powerful devices and faster internet speeds, PCs and laptops are the portal through which gamers can play with friends, family and other streamers no matter where they are around the world.

But co-operation isn’t just about flexible gameplay, it’s also about collaborating with other streamers, building your community and sharing experiences with other gamers.

“Playing with friends is the best way to play”, Loserfruit says. “So much more fun to be with others, and from a content perspective, allows for big dumb ideas that are so much fun to execute!”

Taylor agrees that gaming is better with friends:

“Co-operation and working with other people, whether that be creators, management, platforms etc, creates an overall greater experience than you could have alone.”

DrewD0g says,

“I joined Facebook Gaming in the hopes that I would one day play with StoneMountain. Fast forward a few months, I had quit my job, started streaming full time and played with the legend himself. After co-streaming with Stone, it opened doors to even more creators, who I now co-stream with on a daily basis. If you have good people to play with, your content will always be entertaining so it’s important to surround yourself with positive people.”

Competition

Competitive gaming is about racing, battling and manoeuvering with and against other players from around the world. It’s a dynamic experience that spans esports athletes playing CS:GO to casual gamers simply unwinding with Rocket League. The main requirement here is smooth responsive gameplay with no FPS drops and low latency connections.

Competition fuels gamers to improve their skills, grow their platforms and try new things. Taylor says it’s really important to “see what you can learn from those ‘rivalling’ against you, to improve yourself”. Lynn Zhou, aka ‘Play it Shady’ agrees: “competition is what drives me to play the games that I do and fuels my passion.”

For Loserfruit, it’s less about competition with others and more about challenging herself.

“Competition is the best motivation for self-improvement. I want to beat my past self, I want to get to the next level. It’s why I did 30 days of Fortnite, Rocket League and Valorant. I had to improve in that amount of time and because of how competitive I am, I improved HEAPS.”

The industry is stepping up to help address these demands in thinner, more powerful gaming laptops. Intel is co-engineering laptops for desktop-calibre gameplay that you can take anywhere, enabling up to 75% lower latency and 3x faster speeds with Intel®️ Killer™️ Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+). Rapid advancements in 5G and cloud gaming technologies will push the envelope even further as people play online from anywhere.

Community

Online gaming communities are growing fast and they’re more vibrant and inclusive than ever before.

“A streamer is nothing without a community”, DrewD0g says. Whether it’s streaming, modding or game-specific forums, much of what makes the experience rewarding is a sense of community. “I often play weekly games with community members and always try to answer all the questions that come my way. It means a lot to me that people have told me how I’ve helped them. Working alone from your room can be isolating but it feels like every time I go live, I know someone will be in my chat that I can connect with.”

Especially through the pandemic, people have turned to gaming for healthy and uplifting connections. Intel is supporting this goal by leading anti-toxicity efforts, supporting more diverse streamers, and even creating the AI-based Bleep app, which aims to automatically remove offensive language from game chat. Communities are at the heart of gaming and that’s good for all gamers as it attracts more players, fans, sponsors and investment.

Play it Shady says community is about building a group of close, like-minded people who support you and each other, and for her, that’s what gaming is all about.

Loserfruit and Taylor are on the same page.

“Online community is everything. Community is the only way we get anything done as a streamer,” Loserfruit says.

“Community means giving back to the people that gave you the platform in the first place, staying connected with your fanbase,” Taylor says.

Gaming is here to stay and has a bright future. The industry is collaborating more closely and innovating more rapidly than ever before to ensure gamers can find the PC, gameplay and communities that are right for them. There is much to look forward to in terms of the technologies that come next, and the gaming experiences they’ll make possible. Indeed, we are just getting started!