The Big Fries

You know, I was on the board of a company called Canesta, which Microsoft purchased last fall - they make, well, Kinect style technology is probably the easiest way to describe it. I think that's a rich vein of innovation that Microsoft's going to be pursuing - I'm not sure how the other companies are going to react to that.

Certainly those depth-sensing cameras are going to get better and better - so that they can really differentiate what's happening in a room, movements of fingers in a hand, highly detailed data I think that's going to open up a potentially interesting new interface. To technology as a whole, but primarily to game designers.

It's really easy to predict the future. The hard part is predicting when that future is going to happen.

You give game designers a whole new capability and they figure out what to do with it. You can kind of see that happening now with iOS and iPad. The touchscreen. So many limitations are related to a controller with buttons. If you try to put on-screen buttons and press them, it doesn't work so well.

Now people are actually designing for the interface they're creating games which are really relevant and interesting because they're doing things which are native to that. I think that's what you're going to see with both the current and future consoles that can sense the player and the environment and react to it. I think there's going to continue to be innovation there, on the console side, the hardware side.

I think the challenge is less about that... I worry more about innovation on the software side, honestly. I worry about too many sequels. The problem when budgets and teams get really big is that it just gets too risky for publishers to go out and do new things. I think the heart and soul of entertainment is surprising the audience. Doing something new and different.

How many times do we want to play Halo? I love Halo, but I want something different - I've been playing that game for a long time! [laughs]

Call of Duty is another great example right now. At least with Call of Duty there's this rich history of war you can tap into and present new things. These experiences can only go on so long. You see that in the movies, right? You can only go on making sequels for so long. Viewers decline. People want something new. They want something different and surprising.

How does that come into a market where budgets have gotten so big and expectations have gotten so big? How can we make room for that creativity to appear? I think that's the challenge for these big console publishers. They know that. It's a tough challenge.

It would be kind of a weird time to bring out another pure console. I think you're more likely to see capability being built into set-top boxes, into televisions. Or what's happening with OnLive, stuff that's happening out in the cloud. Something very light at home, dependent on a fast broadband connection. I think you're more likely to see competition come from those sorts of directions rather than yet another big expensive box sitting at home. I don't know, maybe I don't have enough vision in that area but three companies seems like enough to be fighting it out.

There's always been this tension between how much technology you want locally and how much you want remotely. On the one hand you can make the same argument about home PCs - that the home PC should just go away, we should just have a keyboard and a screen and all the computing hardware should be out, shared somewhere online. You could say we're slowly heading in that direction, but I first heard that idea more than twenty years ago. We're a little closer.

In some ways it's become a simpler problem. We're a lot less dependent on latency and stuff like that, but, if the price is cheap enough, people like to have their own stuff, you know? They like to buy stuff and have it there and deal with it locally. So I'm a little sceptical sometimes about these futuristic visions for where we're going to get to.

For me it's really easy to predict the future. The hard part is predicting when that future is going to happen. This is one of those things that falls into that category, for me. There are some real problems, and I'm sure you can interview lots of other people who know a lot more about it than I do, around latency and compression and things like that. I just know that for my kids, in my house now, they prefer to play on the local machine as opposed to using OnLive, which we also have.

But OnLive has definitely moved that ball a long way down the path from where it was before. They've solved a lot of problems and done a lot of great work. I'd like to see them funding more original content. You were talking about a fourth console maker coming into the market - they're a little bit like that.

It's like a fourth console that's come out but doesn't have any must-have exclusive content on their platform. It's like if you launched a competitor that only had the same stuff everybody else has. It'd be tough to sell, right?

In a lot of ways I think it's the most exciting time. Honestly. I think about the speeches I used to give, 10-15 years ago, saying 'some day everybody is going to be a gamer, it's going to be an important form of media, bigger than movies or music'. Now I can't give that speech anymore because it's already happened. We have this huge audience now, and it's so diverse how we reach them, through cellphones, though web browsers.

I'm optimistic about our future. Digital distribution is in the process of opening up a direct connection between developers and their audience. That's really exciting. It's like when I was first starting out, you can have one guy who writes a game and puts it up and people can play it - and it can matter.