The Guardian has an interview with Will Wright in which he says:
The only next gen system I’ve seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that’s happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.
The interesting rhetorical move here is that “next-gen” has been tied to “more polygons” for such a long time, but why not reclaim “next-gen” for better purposes?
The Wii and the DS are both next-gen systems in need of next-gen games. And by next-gen games I mean lighter and casual games.
Games. Not digital entertainment. Games.
Throughout the 90s and the early aughts, the focus was overwhelmingly on everything but the game – interactive video, FMV cutscenes, “complex” narratives, moving emotional journeys, user created content, games as fiction. I’m no saying these things are going away, but we have reached a point where the “series of interesting decisions” that makes a game what it is can easily get lost in a sea of cutscenes, railroading and decisions whose only consequence is whether you end up with a happy ending or not.
As much as I enjoyed Half-Life 2, gaming’s future lies with Wii Sports and the Xbox Live version of Settlers of Catan.