The Father of the Xbox on Console Gaming Today

Seamus Blackley, formerly of Microsoft and "father" of the Xbox...

WVW: Now that you can look down on the hardware arena as an outsider, what do you think about the current directions being taken in consoles?

Blackley: Consoles work because there’s a social pattern that involves sitting in front of the television to be entertained in your home. Games naturally appeared there as a “programming choice.” This is the same reason that video games appeared in arcades—people had a social pattern of playing coin-operated amusements that Nolan and others exploited by making machines that had the same usage pattern, but had novel content.

As we see consumer behavior change today, as we do with Facebook, for example, new places to put games emerge. There’s a moment here where we have to watch and see what this means for game-specific hardware, and it’s very interesting. On one hand, you have Kinect and its ilk, running on HD and possibly 3D televisions. On the other, we see handheld play patterns shifting to new devices such as the iPad. It is fun to see that nearly every new device that releases to consumers becomes a de facto game platform.