More from J Allard

J Allard, corporate vice president on Microsoft's Xbox team and the company's new "chief XNA officer," had a lot more to say than I could fit into today's story about XNA, the combined Windows/Xbox game development system. Here are some excerpts from my interview with him:

On the philosophy behind the initiative: "Our point of view is very consistent with what Microsoft has always done, which is, the success of our platforms are predicated on the success of the experiences that our partners create. Our role in this is to establish a bedrock platform that gives the best creatives and the best developers in the world the most expansive canvas with the best palette to express and create their visions and realize their visions and bring them to market. In doing that, they’ll create new things that we could never have imagined and create draw for our platform. That whole ecosystem, that whole dynamic, is really what fuels category growth."

On competition with other forms of entertainment: "Our vision for gaming is really that it takes a place right next to television, movies, film and music and it just becomes a ubiquitous entertainment experience, and there’s something in it for everybody. Today we haven’t created as an industry a stable and robust enough and expansive enough platform to draw the world’s greatest creators in and to drive that explosive category growth. We’re sort of PC circa 1985."

On why Sony and Nintendo aren't doing something similar: "Because the PC is so open, there’s nothing that prevents Sony or Nintendo from going and building a very rich, software-based development platform. I think the thing that holds them back is it’s not in their DNA. Sony is a hardware company and Nintendo is an intellectual property company and we’re the software platform company. It is in our DNA, and it is an essential part of our strategy. I think it will fuel incredible category growth and benefit our partners a great deal."

On the need to make gaming more accessible: "We have to create a game development platform that draws more game creators, innovative game creators to create experiences that don’t require 50 hours of investment, that don’t require five hours before you get the first big reward, that don’t require one hour of learning before you have fun. If I turn on the TV and I flip to "Friends," I’m laughing. If I turn on a game console today or a PC today and try to play a game, the delta between turning it on and having fun is too long for most people’s patience. The input controllers and everything else, it’s just intimidating. We’re intimidating 80 percent of our potential audience and driving them to go watch TV or go watch sports or go to a game or go to a movie or buy a record. That’s our ultimate competition: to capture more of those leisure dollars in the ecosystem and bring those to the gaming ecosystem.

On that last point, there was an interesting story by Clive Thompson in Slate over the weekend: Can a video game be too hard?. For more background on Allard, see his bio on the Microsoft page. IGN has an interesting interview with him here. And Rob Guth of The Wall Street Journal had lots of insight into Allard's personality in this story, which starts by describing the PlayStation 2 in his office, "pierced by a .50-caliber machine gun bullet."