Many interpreted Kojima's statements as a bold endorsement of the distribution model in development by the likes of OnLive and its ilk, but this argument is about more than just the idea of playing games without local processing horsepower. Before we all ditch our consoles and slow down the already overburdened infrastructures of Internet providers such as Comcast with a ton of incremental streaming games data, there's a huge amount of potential for leveraging connected, multiplatform games in ways that center on player-convenience.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have been very much in the "walled garden" business when it comes to connectivity and social networking for the past five years. Yes, they make token gestures of openness, like providing thoroughly half-assed Facebook functionality and Twitter applications that don?t work on a system-wide level, but they are nowhere even close to supporting the kind of openness for which these services are designed. For years, the culture of the first-party console guys has been all about bringing you to . If you want to play with their toys, you have to play in garden. That was fine for a while, but services like Facebook Connect have since allowed developers on other platforms to take a radical, but very smart, shift in strategy. Instead of making you go to them, they go to where you .

We all have a friends list on Facebook, and let's face it, the thought of having to build one somewhere else is so daunting that it's actually a deterrent. Being able to leverage our friends list in a PC or Mac-based browser game or on an iPhone or Android device is incredibly convenient. It takes the bouncer away from the door to the social aspect of the experience, and lets us all stay connected while being aware of what everyone we know is playing.

This is but a small piece of the revolution though. It's not just buddy management that keeps the three console manufacturers behind big, stupid walls. Every experience you have in their garden has to stay there. Even if you're playing the same game as a "real" friend, but on a different platform, you have absolutely no way of sharing your experience, your data, or of communicating in any way from within the game. If you want to stay in touch, you have to use other methods of communication. In the "old world" where platform-exclusivity was of paramount importance, this made sense. But in the new world order, it's just plain stupid. Third-party publishers and developers are in the business of building experiences and brands. An important way of allowing these brands to flourish is to provide ways for players to share their enthusiasm and invite their friends to participate. In a world where we're all connected in so many ways, isn't it ridiculous that people playing Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360 can't play against, or even communicate with, people playing it on PlayStation 3? The game itself should be the most important consideration, but in the current culture it isn't; the is.

Last November as a way of unifying games, and referenced Silicon Knights founder Dennis Dyack's vision for a "one console" future. This idea of a common hardware platform still doesn't make any sense, but the idea of unifying software and particularly services definitely does. And if you step away from traditional consoles, we're seeing a big move in this direction. It's happening a lot in PC, and particularly in the more ambitious browser games, but the most exciting area is mobile games.