Gather round the 21st century hearth

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What about the games?
Being able to play games like "Halo" or "Grand Theft Auto" will guarantee sales, but it won't get the next generation console in the middle of the living room.

At a major video game expo earlier this year Microsoft executive J Allard expressed the thinking behind the Xbox 360.

Microsoft's new game console "Xbox 360" is displayed in Tokyo
Toru Hanai / Reuters
Microsoft's Xbox 360 has three IBM microprocessors that are expected to deliver powerful computing and advanced graphics.

"We used to fill the living room with kids and adults," said Allard, recalling the late 1970s and 1980s, the mythical golden age of home video gaming when games boasted elegantly simple design that didn't require 50-page manuals.

A 2004 study by AOL reported that U.S. women over the age of 40 spend 50 percent more time each week playing online games than men. But the online games in question were what the industry calls ""casual games;" quick one-offs or digital versions of more popular board games like Monopoly for the PC.

Trying to bring such gamers into the console fold, the Xbox 360 will offer through its online service downloadable versions of "casual games." (The Sony PlayStation 3 is expected to offer similar, family friendly titles for download although nothing has been announced.)

Will the determining factor for family entertainment come down to how well the next generation consoles play Backgammon?

Take a look some numbers related to the Sony PlayStation 3:  A Cell processor running at 3.2 GHz, with two teraflops of overall performance, 256 MB XDR of main RAM at 3.2 GHZ and a graphics chip with 512 MB of graphics render memory capable of 100 billion shader operations and 51 billion dot products per second.

Does this look like a machine built for backgammon?

We're talking eye candy here. Both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 will support HDTV.

All that processing power also means smarter NPCs -- non-player characters -- who will be able to more effectively react and learn from player actions.   There will be more embedded learning and intelligence in how game events transpire.

Games are defined by cause and effect, but the way games may transpire in the next generation will have more parallels to the real world. A player's actions within a game will have repercussions...and those repercussions will have repercussions. The world will treat the player the way he treats it.

The more realistic the world, the more gamers can become attached to its outcome. And the more attached, the greater the chance of emotional attachment.

Evoking emotion has been another goal of game development and while we can't say whether the processing power of the next generation consoles will be able to meet the challenge, the goal is certainly one step closer.