Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Gaming Hardware

Many aspects of game design are independent of the hardware running the game: subject matter, theme, and art style, for example. Nevertheless, the future of interactive entertainment is closely tied to the future of computing hardware. At the moment, the principal emphasis in hardware design is on making games look and sound better, and, indeed, the amount of audiovisual improvement in the last 20 years has been astonishing. But game hardware does much more than that: It determines how complex and how smart the games can be. And that, in turn, affects the kinds of games that we can make. We have just started to build games that simulate the behavior of humans, for example, at a level above the trivial. For more powerful simulations, ...