From C&VG
It was an intriguing keynote speech the other day - are we now officially allowed to call it Xbox Xenon?
J Allard: I heard I used the word Xenon on stage, it wasn't officially in the script...
So is Xenon still just a codename then?
J Allard: ....
For the benefit of the tape, Mr Allard is at this point giving us a knowing smile... Okay so you talked about the new HD era in your keynote, what do you think are going to be its defining characteristics and will it signal the real beginning for gaming as a mass entertainment medium?
J Allard: I think it does, it really does set us up to break into mass entertainment. What a lot of people will do when they think of the HD era is naturally associate it with the visual quality, the aural fidelity of surround sound.
But when I think about the shift from 2D to 3D - a lot people would say side-scroller to polygonal - I would also put into the 3D era analogue control, real music, moving from cartridge to CD, larger levels and so on and so forth, there were a lot of very very important shifts between 2D and 3D.
From 3D to HD, not only will we see the visual and aural improvement in what the game medium has to offer, but also the design point for games will really have online and community at the centre. They'll create an opportunity for gamers to self-express and have more influence over the structure of the game, the outcome of the game, over the challenges in the game and their appearance within the game. I think that's going to be a very important trend.
On the input side, the one thing I'll say about input is that voice is here to stay and video is around the corner. So I think the HD era is going to mark a number of significant trends, personalisation, self-expression, community, better visuals, better audio, moving to 16:9 as a preferred format for mastering the content and new input that's a little bit more comfortable for the mass market.
Add all those things up and I think we have an opportunity to reach more users.
Everything Microsoft say seems to place Xenon at the heart of a digital lifestyle. Is that infamous 'brown box' what you're really aiming for in the next generation? One piece of kit that can do everything for you?
J Allard: Well I've never found one piece of kit that would do everything for me. I think what happens in this digital era, in the digital decade which we're a part of right now, is that there are ancillary functions which are straightforward to build onto a core.
Different types of devices: my phone has a camera, but I also own a camera and so my digital camera at its core, is a camera, but it also happens to play music, but it has an MP3 player as well. My cell phone, at its core, its soul is a cell phone, it happens to have a camera, it does text, does my email as well. I also have an MP3 player, at its core it's a music player but I can also put in travel directions...
So when we look forward to the next generation of Xenon,...damn I said it again, the soul is still gaming, the soul of the machine will be gaming, but I think that the consumers' expectations are that there's ancillary functions that they want to pull in. The nice thing about the interactive medium of gaming is we can pull them in, in interesting ways. The music on my cell phone is just the music on my cell phone, but in videogames I can make it the music in my game.
Do you think the PC will still play an important role in next-gen gaming?
J Allard: I think you hit the nail on the head for Windows and gaming and that's the input model and the fidelity of the screen, the types of tools that are available around the PC, you can do really exciting things together, so I say the HD era is the era of self-expression.
In Project Gotham Racing, there's a Paris race track right? Several tracks cut through the city of Paris. Imagine that the next version of Gotham just sets up the city of Paris, and now you can drive through however you want and boom, you've created your own track. There's a little track editor but the track editor is just a drive through town. You can do that on a console, the next-generation Xbox can do that very well, but then you say "I want it to look like my Paris" and I want to paint the Eiffel tower purple and I want to put my name on a storefront, maybe I want to do some customised billboards.
A console is a bad place to do that. But now you can go over into a PC space and maybe you can refine the track a little, change the colour of the Eiffel tower, modify your billboards or whatever and that gets reflected back to the console environment.
Which you can then share with other console owners?
J Allard: I think that's important that you want to share with the other console owners, you want to be able to say "It's J's racetrack through Paris. Meet me at seven and we'll go race my track, because we've all raced the tracks that came with the game."
The other thing that's going to become very important when we think about self-expression and this sharing, is being able to manage that for kids. So we have to set it up and go a little bit further than we've done with parental controls for example. Mom or dad will be able to say Junior can see self-created content from his friends, but maybe not from just anyone. Or maybe even not at all.
How critical is online going to be in the next generation and do you think we're going to need a new definition of online within the wireless, wi-fi world we'll be living in?
J Allard: I do think that online is incredibly important; I also think wireless is incredibly important but I think the most important part of your question is: do we have to redefine online?
And I think we do. I mean what we've done thus far with Xbox Live as our first step is really create a foundation for the hardcore gamer. Create a foundation and a set of services that are appropriate for the developers creating games for the hardcore gamers. We really have to start redefining that notion. In the States we have an experiment going on right now called Xbox Live Arcade. That allows you to buy small games that don't even exist at retail and that come over broadband and allow you to play simple puzzle like games or retro classic arcade games up on the big screen.
We're learning a lot from that experiment. That just gives you an idea of the types of ways we have to move forward, to expand our notion and say 'We've got this big pipe into the house'. Whether it's wired or wireless we've got a lot of bandwidth, what kind of value can we deliver to the consumer beyond hardcore multiplayer frag fests?
Do you think the next gen will see a revolution in terms of interface and the ways we interact with games?
J Allard: I think interface is a bit of a loaded term. I think there are some new concepts that are really important. Look at what we did with voice in Xbox Live, some people say "Well that's not really input, I'm not really controlling my character". But you are co-ordinating your team, what could be more important?
In some games in fact there are players who just get up at the top of the map and they're telling the team what's going on, to build a strategy. It's their only input. Once they position their character, they drop the controller and co-ordinate: "Hey that guy's flanking you from the right."
So I think voice is a very natural augment to the input system and you might see games that are exclusively voice in the next generation. It's very, very natural, so natural that we don't even think of it as input.
Video, I think video is going to make a much bigger impression in the next generation, whether it's gesture based UI [user interface] or the notion of what I'm doing in my living room and my reaction playing a part. If we were to play cards, playing cards and the strategy behind poker, if I can't see you, there's not much too it, you can just not say anything and I have to wait for the cards to turn and that's not very much fun in poker.
I think there'll be more natural ways for people to interface. The other thing I'll say is that there's an interface responsibility that we have as a console provider which is to make it easier to navigate some of these new features. The next generation, the HD era provides such an opportunity to deliver new value, new ideas, new features that we could easily overwhelm the mass market consumer, we're so anxious to get. So we want to create some standardised interfaces, some standardised vocabulary in our visual user interface, so that every game behaves the same for certain types of functions.
Will this mean a fairly rigidly fixed interface?
J Allard: It's not frozen, that's the best part of it. By abstracting it from the hardware and having a service that delivers, we can change the interface tomorrow, next week, next year, if we have a new concept or if we learn from our users that one of the concepts is a little challenging.
Take a look at Windows - by changing it, I don't mean that with each release of Windows we change File Print. Don't change the things that work; either augment the things that work with new things, or change the things that work but are hard to discover. I'll give you an example: a notification comes up that says "I want to play Halo". Say we had a button in the interface that allows you to say 'yes' or 'no'. Six months later we discover that the user community is getting frustrated because they forgot to set a 'do not disturb' - so the notification pops up and it now says 'yes', 'no' or 'do not disturb' and then I never want to see another notification, because I'm watching a movie or playing a game and I don't want to be disturbed.
So now we set a third option which says 'do not disturb' in the interface and we can do that and the nice thing is when we make that addition based on the feedback from the community, the very first game that shipped nine months before we made the change, now has adopted that interface.
If we make a change to match-making, how you find your friends, how you give user feedback, it doesn't work in Halo 2, because Halo 2 is fixed. By removing that and standardising it and abstracting it from the game, it gives us the flexibility to be responsive as well as progressive with our users.
How have you been testing this interface? With gamers? Non-gamers?
J Allard: It's a good question. What we've done with Xenon is basically segmented our audience, we've found a set of questions which sort of sub-divides the gaming community as well as the non-gaming community. Then when we go out and do our research we go across that spectrum and certain things we'll focus towards one end of the spectrum, and some at the other. We always try and get data from across the entire spectrum.
Take trigger sensitivity. The hardcore guys probably have more feedback for us and non-gamers probably can't help us. With the user interface, we're trying to make it simpler for more people. Hardcore folks will get it.
Do you see a kind of new relationship in games design emerging? With enthusiastic modders and the advent of micro-billing, is everyone potentially a next-gen games designer?
J Allard: Well I don't know about everyone, but I hope so. Today we get to add to games by enjoying them, particularly online. Look at what people do in Halo or whatever your favourite online game is. Somebody does something that was never expected, that wasn't following the rules, they played the game differently from the way the AI did which is leaving an imprint on the game.
So I hope, well my dream when I wake up in the morning is to let the developers become the rock stars, right and let them express themselves in the medium. I think in the next generation we'll hear more and more developers say "I want to make the gamer the rock star" and giving them the tools so they can express themselves in the community.
With 3000 people at GDC that are set up to be rock stars in videogames right now, we have the potential to go 10 million rock stars and 10 million contributors. The excitement around the world wide web: it's very nice that the libraries of the world are online, but what's exciting about the world wide web to me, is that readers have become writers.
It's not about the convenience it's about the ultimate remix, it's about the fact that we can write as well as read, it'd be no fun if we couldn't contribute on the web and we couldn't post in the forums. It's fundamentally changed the medium, it's changed journalism. So I think game development will go through that type of shift, as the game creators yield more control to the game players.
So what new kind of games do you think we'll see in this new HD era and will they change the established boundaries and genres as we know them?
J Allard: I think there's going to be room for the classic genres of today to persist, I mean football games, Formula One games, racing games, sporting games, they're not going to go away. Will they get re-defined a little bit? Sure, they'll progress but if you look at the biggest games of the last era, of the last generation, look at The Sims. Without self expression it's nothing. Look at Grand Theft Auto, there isn't a beginning, a middle and an end - it doesn't follow the classic three-act structure. Those are the two biggest games that exist and they're about yielding and giving more control and emphasis to the gamer.
I don't know what genre you call either of those games and they were the most popular of this current generation, so they'll signal and influence the industry in a fundamental way in the next era. I think we will have new genres, I don't know whether we'll have labels for them. There are a lot of movies that I can't categorise but that I enjoy, it got harder and harder to classify movies as that craft evolved - now we have the HD era I think it's going to be harder and harder.
What's Halo 2? The folks who've played multiplayer, who've put in hundreds of hours multiplayer, have almost forgotten that there's a single-player story. There's some people who've never played the single-player story. So is it an action-adventure game? I don't know, it's clearly a first-person shooter, but that's clearly more about the input mechanic than it is about the game.
In your keynote, you seemed to draw a clear distinction between Microsoft and Sony's approach to the next generation?
J Allard: I think there is a fundamental difference in approach between what Sony's doing with their next generation, or what they've said they're doing with their next generation and what we're doing.
It's emphasised by the most important speech I'll do all year which is at this Game Developers Conference to the 3000 people that create games. That is my number one customer, I've listened to the them for six years in preparation for the system that we're going to be showing for the first time in May.
We've designed it for them and what they've told me for years and years and years about the balance between hardware, software and services. You need all those things in a fundamental balance, you need things like standardised UI, you need things like simple-to-program APIs, you need things like micro-transactions. And so the platform offering that we give to the development community is very expansive, it has all three of those components in harmony.
Now my science fair comment was about the fact that Sony's last keynote was to an electrical engineering conference, no game programmers and they were talking about how sophisticated their chip was. They've designed their chip in a very interesting way, but it's not a balanced system.
The game development community hasn't been asking for a very clever chip that has very high performance, they've been saying we want micro-transactions. And so I was trying to draw a distinction between the approach that we're taking and the approach Sony's taking. I wanted to remind the development community that I'm the guy who's got his ears open and wants to hear what their thoughts are - where they want us to go next year, where they want us to go the year after.
