Do me a favor and take a glance at your DVD player. Who made it? I'm willing to bet that for every hundred readers I could probably get a dozen different answers. Now answer me this: Will your DVD player play a DVD? Putting aside for a second the issue of regional encoding, your DVD player will play any DVD. It doesn't matter who makes it. And if you look around your room, you'll probably discover that you have more than one ... Your PC plays DVDs, your PS2 plays DVDs, hell, you probably have a bunch of DVD players sitting around your house. They're cheap, they're reliable. DVD players are a Commodity.

So why should it be any different for your video games? It seems hard to imagine a world where you can pop a PS3 game into an Xbox 360, much less your PC, but we take that for granted that we can do that with DVDs. Has the videogame industry outgrown the multi-system model?

Denis Dyack, President of Silicon Knights (creator of Eternal Darkness and the upcoming Too Human), thinks so. He said as much During his keynote speech at the Leipzig Games Convention, which kicks off this week in Germany.

According to Dyack, every technology eventually goes through a process of commodification (which I was disappointed to discover has nothing to do with toilets). Instead of individual manufacturers dictating the technology and charging royalties, the technology spec is agreed on by all parties and everyone can get down to the nitty-gritty of actually making great content.

That's hard to imagine right now -- it's hard to see Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft getting together for some coffee, agreeing on a technology, and then sharing a hug. But there's actually a lot of pressure to make this happen whether or not the big players agree to it. Put yourself in the shoes of a big publisher like Electronic Arts: When you want to release, say, the new Harry Potter game, you've got to make something like eight different versions for eight different console and PC specs. This is a huge expense. And it doesn't really benefit you, the one shelling out the money for one particular version.

Dyack thinks we might see a single-platform gaming universe as early as the next console generation. I think it might take longer than that, but I think within the next decade or so we'll definitely see a "generic gaming spec" that becomes the de-facto platform of choice for both gamers and game publishers. PCs and Macs and Linux will rush in to support the spec, and multiple companies will start manufacturing the console box (or building it right into TVs). Whether big players like Sony are involved or left behind is up to them.

      -Fargo