2. Do you think the gaming industry is underestimating one aspect of interactive entertainment that will take us all by surprise in the early 21st century?

Lou: Yes. I think we continue to underestimate the power interactivity brings to our entertainment form. As a group, we collectively must continue to reinvent our medium with each new hardware release and each new software advance. The audience is hungry to explore the new capabilities of the delivery of our medium to the near exclusion of evolving content. The surprise will come when the talented people in our industry are allowed to focus all their creative energy on the experience of interactive entertainment instead of the technology and tricks to make the equipment do another amazing thing.

Brett: There's going to be a lot about the next century that will surprise us, and I only wish I knew what all those things were.

I will say that within the next few years, we will see a revolution in how we see multiplayer games, both persistent state and standard. Players will have new ways to interact with each other and with the environment. Game design will give greater depth to cooperative play. We're learning that players not only want to defeat each other, but they want to form allegiances and struggle against a foe together. We've seen some early experiments with the concept of meaningful cooperative play, and I expect to see it blossom in the next decade.

3. If there's one thing wrong with the gaming industry you'd want to change in the new millennium, what would it be and why?

Brett: I'd like to see all the hardware standardized and all the driver and compatibility issues vanish. Also, I'd appreciate it if the hardware worked as advertised.

Lou: I would like to see broad-based scalable solutions to technology that let products perform well and look great on a huge variety of equipment. I don't want to see one physical platform per se, but rather a standard metaphor that all entertainment could be created for that would work well on many platforms. It would be great to create content that is of a higher quality than can be experienced with current technology and let the technology grow into the experience instead of leaving it behind. It saddens me that so many of our great creative efforts can't even be viewed, let alone enjoyed, by today's market. I long for the days when we can look at old games the way filmmakers look at films from decades past.

Next: Louis Castle and Brett Sperry (cont.)