I think for the most part, the more transparent the interface is, the better. If my mind is in the game and I'm seamlessly manipulating whatever I'm doing in the game as an agent without thinking about the interface, then it's successful. I've played enough first-person shooters where my fingers are programmed for the WASD keys, and the mouse look, and all that, so when I'm playing a first-person shooter I'm not thinking about my hands at all, even though that's my primary connection to the game. I think that's one of the reasons why the Wii has been so successful- for a lot f people who have never played games before, if you hand them an XBOX controller with all these buttons and you tell them, "Well this button makes you go left, that button makes you go right, that mutton makes you swing," and all that, it's a really intimidating thing. It's almost like being put in a car, and every car has a totally different set of controls- levers and knobs and things you control and they all behave differently. The Wii, you just kind of picked up the controlled and swung it like a tennis racket and you were playing tennis. And I think that was very successful. It's actually very interesting looking at the difference between input and output, and that games were steadily getting higher-res graphics to where they were pumping out megabytes per second of graphics, but yet at the same time, the input was still a few bits per second through a joystick or a keyboard. Now as we're starting to move into more motion-controlled stuff, I think we are getting a little more bandwidth going back in. Not much. It's going to take some learning; I think we're still in the first generation of these things as well, but at some point I think we're going to get to deeper and deeper levels- I think one of the things that's been kind of the holy grail for computer science has been the idea of emotional parsing: can a computer understand your emotional state the way you can when you're conversing with somebody? You can kind of tell when I'm conversing with you if you're engaged or getting bored or surprised- if you computer had that ability, we could be refining the game on the fly, you know, to find out what parts are boring- let's skip the boring parts, let's find the part you really get into, let's find the part that gets you to lean forward and your eyes get wide. If the computer could understand your emotional state at that level, you know, the game in some sense can start evolving to fit you.
