Gamemaker David Broben talks about the next generation of video game consoles (Xbox, PlayStation 3). It's an interesting read even if you aren't a gamer (and I'm not).

An excerpt:

The games industry is at a watershed right now. We have been moving ever more to games that are driven by the subject matter.

But there comes a point where, as with the film industry before us, the artistic content becomes the main driver rather than just a small part, and the extra impetus given by the massive step-up of Xbox 360 and the forthcoming PlayStation 3 has the potential to push us into this new era.

A similar transition happened in the early 1930s in the film industry. In the 1920s, films were almost pure spectacle, and that spectacle became ever more extreme to keep the audiences coming back - cars skidded around towns, people dangled and fell from buildings, cars were forever being smashed to pieces on railway crossings.

The stories were light-weight justifications for linking the dramatic moments together. The advent of synchronised speech, the Talkies, didn't change this right away.

But it opened the door for the golden age of film, where Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd gave way to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles in the 1930s.