What we really want out of our next console

Yeah, this is a rambling, self-contradictory mess of an article, but it's funny, and you gotta love rants like this:

If pretty graphics are king, it's time to remember what pretty graphics are for: immersion. For whatever its faults, Doom III knew this.

Immersion means soothing to sleep the part of our brain that remembers we're not intergalactic bounty hunters or world-class athletes. And that part of us is rudely jostled awake when our snowboarder bounces off an invisible wall in midair...

...because he strayed from the race area. I understand you can't have infinite space, guys surfing right off the mountain and taking a snowboard tour of Asia. But put a cliff there. Cliffs are solid. Empty air is not solid.

Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.

Game makers: it doesn't have to be a jumping game for you to give the characters the basic ability to jump low obstacles that all humans have. And when I walk up to little ledges that are 10-inches off the ground, a ledge a toddler could crawl over, and you arbitrarily don't let me pass because it's not a jumping game, you remind me of what I'm really doing: playing a game. We're to the stage where it should be a minimum requirement in the game universe: rock should act like rock, air should act like air and humans should move like humans.

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