This year, Microsoft set the tone for GDC.

When the Microsoft team walked into the general interest keynote and regaled the crowd with a software strategy and fastidiously avoided talking about the Xbox 2, it was clear that the next generation of gaming could wait atleast another year.

Overall, this is a not a bad thing. This industry and its fans has developed an unhealthy techno-fetish for new hardware. And while the staggering technical achievements built out of the hardware wars of the past years makes us want more, the financial and creative strain of keeping up threatens the entire enterprise.

We need to go on a hardware diet.

Whenever we get the next generation of hardware, it will be cool. Microsoft showed a demonstration of a car crash detailed at such high resolution that the junk flying through the air after the collision is not comprised of random bits spewed out of a particle system. The parts that go wheeling through the air are parts of the car model. And it's all real time.

The hardware is about to expand the expressive pallette in ways we've only dreamed about in the past.

For sure, gaming is going to take another step forward in a couple of years. But without aggressive work on the back end, the design challenges, the business management practices and the coding process, all this new hardware will do nothing more than strain the good relationship the industry has built up with the mass market.

Sure, I want an Next box or PS3 as much as the next gaming fan. But before we pull the rug out from under the folks that just dropped money this past Christmas for a new PS2, we should make sure that the next generation of games don't take a degree in 3-D graphics to understand why they are cool. As Laura Fryer, director of Microsfot's advanced technology group pointed out at the keynote, "Fans don't notice that a character is self-shadowing. They just notice that the character looks more real."

Right now, the next generation of gaming looks to be comprised of a general advance of eveyrthing. Progress is going to be marked by a surging tide of notable improvements. But right now we lack the "killer feature". We don't have the one thing that everyone can see that stands in for the quality of the rest. Right now, the next generation of gaming will be the subtle generation, the expert generation, the game dork generation. It will not connect with the mass market so vital to the surval of the business. The guy at best buy needs an obvious reason to toss the PS2 he just bought last Christmas into the closet and shell out the bucks for a fancy next gen system with few games.

The people at GDC seem to understand this on a fundamental level. The theme this year is EVOLVE, not "progress." From what I've seen, there's a lot of ingredients in the next gen pot right now. But the stew needs to simmer.

GDC 2004? This is not the year of hardware. Thankfully.