Play the game [multimedia research]

Children easily cope with the technology and user interfaces of games. For them, digital entertainment is a fact of life, not some futuristic dream. Moreover, their experiences with entertainment technology shape their expectations for digital media-based technology. The author considers why the advances in games and digital entertainment are or seem to be swifter than in multimedia research. It seems that the underlying question behind the development effort is different. In digital entertainment, the customer is king. Developers constantly assess who their customers are and whether their products meet consumers' needs. Multimedia researchers, however, seem to focus on how to solve a particular problem and ignore the real-world applicability part of the equation. Perhaps we should play computer games more often and put ourselves in the consumers' seat to find out what is happening out there.