Newsweek columnist N'Gai Croal has published part four of his excellent D.I.C.E. interview with Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison. Perhaps the most interesting discussion to come out of this dialog was related to the flow of information out of SCE. Essentially, Harrison acknowledged that the company should be more forthcoming about its plans for the PlayStation business. He also confirmed that the PS3 will at some point receive DVD upscaling.

"There is a cultural thing about our approach in Japan that has to change. Our approach in Japan is, 'Once it's perfect, we'll share it with everybody else.' Whereas I think in order to engender trust in our users, we have to share some things that might be not quite perfect, but are ready to give you an indication of what's coming," Harrison explained. "So we could say, 'You know, we're not sure when it's coming, but we're going to have DVD upscaling on Playstation 3.' There you go. There's a scoop for you. In my view, we should have a slide on a Web site, or a blog. We should have [Playstation head of platform development Izumi] Kawanishi blog his road map for the Xross Media Bar for Playstation 3. I think he would probably have the biggest blog after yours in the world."

He continued, " ...we have to become more comfortable in sharing our road map. We have to get more liberal in the ways we experiment with some things. Because some things that we think are important may not be important to our consumer. Conversely, something which is lower down on our road map may be the most important thing to a consumer, unexpectedly so. And we need to be a little more open in that regard."

Harrison also divulged a bit more detail about his much anticipated Game Developers Conference keynote. He noted that it's called "Game 3.0" because there have three ages of video games. "The first age was the disconnected island nation console, with games entirely on disc or entirely on cartridge as the whole experience. The second age was the connected console, but where the content was still locked entirely on the disc or the cartridge. And the third age, which we're moving into, is where you have upload and download, this bidirectional relationship with the user," he said. "And something like Amplitude, or Frequency, or even Dance Dance Revolution--you've seen the YouTube clips of the DDR freaks, who are just incredible--what if DDR had the ability like SingStar for you to upload your performance for other people to check out, and you could get that whole community element going?

"Keeping the community inside the game experience rather than breaking it out of the game experience is what Game 3.0 is about, or it's one of the characterizations of what Game 3.0 is about. It's about commerce, it's about community and it's about communication, but it's about collaboration as well. It's this network effect of users creating content and sharing it with each other, and that the game system or the game technology is a provider of that platform as much as it is a piece of gameplay. So I think we can revisit some of these games in the next era, or the era that we're now in, much more successfully with that kind of backbone. So as you said, sharing is a very powerful thing; 'Check out my mix in Amplitude,' that user-to-user, one-to-many, many-to-many communication is really interesting."