Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA).

What does the future of gaming hold? We asked five gaming honchos to reflect on the types of games we will be playing in the future.

Douglas Lowenstein, Steve Dauterman, Scott Miller, Lorne Lanning and Mark Rowland answered the following questions:

What is the next large technological step that will be taken and how will that influence the gaming industry?
What do you think gaming (that features interactive animation) will be like in the future?

Douglas Lowenstein also explained current gaming trends that are sure to continue and influence the upcoming years.

Douglas Lowenstein, President of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA)

Heather Kenyon: What is the next large technological step that will be taken and how will this influence the gaming industry?

Douglas Lowenstein: That is a really tough question to answer. We are just at the beginning of the technology curve for 3-D applications. On the console side, I think what you're seeing, and what you will continue to see, is less of a technology breakthrough in the next year or two, because if you follow the industry, you know that this is an industry where technology advances usually occur every three or four years, with the introduction of new hardware. Hardware, obviously is [already] on the market for the next generation, and it has been there for a couple of years now. What tends to happen is the sophistication of the programmers grows by leaps and bounds each year as they have more depth at maximizing the capability of the hardware. It's less a question of any new technological development than it is a question of the new direction that the programmers can take the hardware."

HK: That's going to push people to be a lot more creative when producing games.

DL: Absolutely.

HK: They will need to be in order to keep consumers satisfied?

DL: This is an industry where the end user is an extremely sophisticated buyer, and has extremely high standards. Programmers, developers, animators, everybody involved in the creation of a product is constantly looking to push the creative boundaries to meet the demand of the consumer. It's not simply a question of how the game looks, which is certainly important, but the quality of the animation, the quality of the sound. All of these things are part of the overall game experience. More than anything else, what determines whether the game has a market is the quality of the gameplay.

HK: Now can I have you look five, ten years in the future... What do you think games will be like? Do you think they'll be predominately the same, just more sophisticated? Or, do you think virtual reality will really be here?

DL: I'm not as much a believer in virtual reality as I am a believer in advances in the use of artificial intelligence. I think certainly visually, graphically and otherwise we will, five years out, be looking at machines that are more powerful, faster, with all kinds of bells and whistles that create a visual experience even more stunning and realistic than what we have today. Beyond that, I think that the next great leap forward is in the area of artificial intelligence; the creation of products where users are interacting in almost human-like ways with the characters. That's the area for tremendous technological growth.

There are games out there today that are artificially intelligent, a lot of the product out there relies on the basics of artificial intelligence to describe the gameplay. It's a question of where that technology goes, so that there's a development of characters and personality within the games that are having interactions with the user. This is several steps beyond the kinds of interactions that occur now.