BIZ: What do you want in a gaming experience today?

LL: What's amazing to me is that a marketing exec at a game publisher will look at my demographic and say, "Oh, they're not buying games anymore." And they'll keep designing games for other people. What I want is games that have evolved with me with the limited disposable time I have in my daily experience. We're really getting tied to everything more constantly. Our life is getting chopped up into micro-fragments that we have to better manage. When I'm home, I'm still getting e-mails from the office on my Blackberry. What I want is an experience where, when I'm bored as hell, I can nurture it, when I want something fast, I can experience that. But I want to experience that within the world I've been nurturing. I want competitive stuff, but I want anti-social gaming.

BIZ: Is that what the new Oddworld game will be about?

LL: Something's next and we haven't been talking about it. We've tried releasing information really early -- Munch's Oddysey was the best example of that and we've learned some lessons there. We've tried holding information back until almost the last minute and we've learned some lessons there. Ideas and innovation are like a fetus in the womb. There's a reason no one gets to see the baby for nine months. Ideas incubate in privacy better, longer. We have been taking a while (with Oddworld) and that is disappointing to some fans. But we believe if we deliver excellence, they'll be thrilled. All is forgiven if you do it right.

BIZ: Will Oddworld still involve your notion of a digital back lot bridging interactive and linear mediums?

LL: Yes. We're also trying to really merge the filmmaking, the television making and the game making as singular experiences. Not only because we think it's fun and interesting and that's what excites us, but we think that's where the tide is going. The retailers today don't want to carry anything below a certain price point. We see gas prices changing the price of manufacturing of plastic and delivering games to stores. Eventually, retail is going to largely go away for gaming. It's just a matter of time. But the gamers want that.

BIZ: What impact have you seen online social networks have on gaming?

LL: When it comes to MySpace, we're working on something now and one of the things I often say is, "MySpace is nice, but once I read about how someone really is, there's no way to kick their ass." It's a social community and we all have billboards of ourselves, but we're not really interacting. The challenge we're tackling is how do we take the MySpace page, which is really just a projection of our personal expression, and turn it into our mobile existence.

BIZ: So you're looking at mobile gaming?

LL: When we look at display devices, really the television monitor -- even when it's 130 inches big -- it's still a stupid device. We're looking into a universe of infinite possibilities and dimensions in these virtual worlds and we're still watching it through this static, stupid, flat screen. But we exist in a 3D world and 3D space and we relate to things in a 3D nature. Our interfaces are really behind. Really, as we're walking down the street, our MySpace page should be floating around us. And if I choose to be looking at specific pages like MySpace people into electronica trans music, then I should be able to set that setting on my eyeglasses and check it out while I'm walking down the street. The world of information that's becoming available to me is through the devices that I'm wearing naturally -- like the phone.

BIZ: Thanks Lorne.