How has entertainment technology changed in the last decade?
Jesse Schell: The big change is the industry moving away from retail. Retail really drove everything that happened in the video game industry. It controlled prices, how many units you needed to sell to be profitable. Now we’ve had this explosion of downloadable content and the power of the internet making social gaming more interesting and feasible, and those things kind of turned everything upside down. Ten years ago it was hard for a small company to get started. Now, a small company has to make choices. There are so many things you can do, like focus on iPhone games, handheld game systems, or Facebook games for example. There are a few technologies that are coming, like the ability to understand human speech, and the implications for entertainment are phenomenal. That, I think, more than anything else will dramatically change the nature of interactive entertainment. These characters in games look pretty good and sound pretty good, but they can’t hear you. Once you can talk to them a
