Suddenly the video game sitting in the living room has become the most powerful computing device in the home. Caught up in and leaning into an accelerating trend toward cheap, high-performance computer graphics, the new and the next generation of video game consoles create virtual worlds increasingly difficult to discern from a live video image. Already, titles like "Majestic" are giving us a hint of what gaming will be like for "the rest of us." Over the next five years - the lifespan of one of these products - video gaming has the potential to revolutionize entertainment, breaking out of its ghetto in the 8 - 18 year-old crowd, to become a mass medium.

Mark Pesce Author, Chair Interactive Media Program, USC School of Cinema-Television mark@playfulworld.com

Internationally recognized as the man who brought virtual reality into the World Wide Web, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of the future for nearly two decades.

The author of three books - including a classic text, Browsing and Building Cyberspace, which sold over 70,000 copies in six languages - Pesce is widely respected as a technologist who possesses vision in equal measure to his technical prowess, paired with a unique ability to translate abstract concepts into concrete explanations. While the technology press quotes Pesce frequently, mainstream publications such as Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the future of interactivity. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed Magazine, Salon Magazine, and numerous Ziff-Davis periodicals.

From 1998 through 2000, Pesce chaired the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California's world-renowned School of Cinema-Television. His mandate - to bring cinema and broadcast television into the interactive era - led him to create a program that encourages creative vision and is producing a generation of entertainment professionals shaping the media of the next century.

Pesce's latest book, The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination, examining the interactive world of the 21st century, was published by Ballantine Books in October 2000.