I think game development used to be very technology-driven. I think that in fact the reverse is true as well. I think that if you look at modern PCs, there's no reason why we need a processor or graphics anywhere near the level that we have, except for games. Games have kind of been the auto racing of the personal computer industry. It's a place where we're always pushing for better graphics, faster processors, more this, more that, and it's probably at least had the same impact on computer industry as auto racing has had on the auto industry. But I think more and more- and also games, I'd say up until about ten years ago, I'd say less so now, were really driven by graphics. It was always expected that the next generation of games would be so much better graphically, but we got to the point where we could put some pretty nice graphics on the screen- we could actually render a human on the screen that actually looked fairly reasonable but they still behaved like a hammer. And so really that's the weak link, is the AI, the behavior, all this other stuff relative to the rendering. So people started realizing that and started spending more time on behavior in games, AI. Then the whole social thing happened- we started getting mobile as well, playing games on our iPhones, on Facebook, things like that. Now the emphasis is way off of graphics; now it's much more kind of interesting factors, I think, more about deeper psychology of "am I kind of playing this game because of the peer pressure of my friends- if I don't play they're not going to earn their bonus points?" Or is it something I kind of pull out my phone and play for a minute as sort of a stress relief? So I think that the broadness of platforms is driving games away from this graphics arms race in an interesting way- that's still happening over here, but that's not really the mainstream of development anymore, that's not the main focus of "I'm going to my next Mario game with twice the resolution." Now it's about "how do I make this game socially engaging such that I'm playing with my friends both synchronously and asynchronously." And I think what really excites me going forward, the next big frontier, is how we make games connect to the world more and more. And I think a lot of the augmented reality stuff has a lot of promise for doing that, that we might be playing games out in the world about the world that we're in. So games really aren't distracting us from our immediate environment, but they're actually getting us more engaged in it.
