World in Motion

The short answer is that it'll have a huge impact. The longer answer is that it'll only have a huge impact once people start designing specifically for those controllers. The first-person shooters and driving games - they've already got a really good controller that people are really happy with as a hardcore audience.

There will be totally new genres that will be developed for those controllers, and it would be foolish of me to try and predict what they'll be - but I'd say they do involve a lot more characterisation and story, and a lot more social interaction.

If you're talking about something like Natal, where you're using your whole body to control something as opposed to just your thumbs, then it's a whole different way of looking at things. You've got to look at people's fatigue levels, and not keep them jumping around for hours on end... you need to give them rest periods.

I see it as a crucial part of the mix. If you ask me to pinpoint what advantages the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have over previous platforms I'd say there are two main things - their connectivity with the internet, especially the Live service and PlayStation Network, and also the ability to interact with them in a way that doesn't use a traditional, scary joypad controller.

For the online side it you only have to look at Facebook and the proliferation of online networking - the way that people interact now, they want to be entertained, but they also want to keep in touch with their friends. If you can combine the two, where you play games that allow you to socially interact, then it becomes a much more fun experience.

I'll give you an example - we're doing fitness titles - I might go to the gym with a few mates because I don't like training on my own. But if I could do a workout in front of my console and be joined by my mates in their own homes, I might not go to the gym so much, but it would still be the same socially interactive experience - and I'd probably do it more often that way, because trying to align when you can all go to the gym... it becomes a lot easier.

We've had to bring in people from outside of the games industry to help us with all of these areas - for example, directors and script writers from the film industry, even cameramen and lighting people.

And we're looking at authors what might have had success with books, we're looking at people that have worked on Facebook applications, people that have managed communities online, people who have backend server experience - because I'm seeing the games developer moving from something that delivers finished product to something that delivers an ongoing service, and that's a much more far-reaching task which requires a much wider skill set.

As a small developer we can't provide all of that straight away, but we can work with key partners and start to build up our expertise.

With our technology and toolset it's one of the areas that we want to grow into - producing episodic, story-led content. We're able to do it quickly and cheaply compared to other developers, and we have a toolset to enable us to take advantage of real actors with the aim of producing, say, an episode of a title every one or two months.

This is something that we're actively pursuing at the moment with new products.

Yes - Sam & Max is definitely a pioneer in that territory, and I have the utmost admiration for some of the other things Telltale has been doing. Because when they started doing it, there wasn't a large market for it, and whoever set up Telltale had a lot of foresight I think.

I can see developers becoming a lot more like TV production companies, and they'll produce regular content to fill the content pipeline, while people like Microsoft and Sony will become the broadcasters of the future, delivering online entertainment which might be interactive, or slightly less interactive depending on how deep you want to go into an experience.