If there's one person who can accurately predict the future of the videogame industry, it's Don Daglow. He's been designing games since the days when computers filled an entire room. Since then, he's done work for Intellivision, EA, and the recently hibernating Stormfront Studios. Despite all his years of experience, Daglow was quick to mention what a fool's errand it is to predict the future in an industry where advancing technology constantly takes us by surprise. Despite this, he did his best to sum up the most important trends from the past few years so that developers can best stay aware of where things area headed, if not predict the next two decades with deadly accuracy. Here are the ten key points Daglow laid out:

　　1. In order to understand where a tree is going to grow, you need to be able to see its roots. With the gaming industry, those roots are with stories, sports, and board games. Daglow mentioned that the sophisticated stories of today's games aren't too much unlike the sports games of old, where every story (game) has a hero (the star of your team) fighting against the villain (the star of the other team).

　　2. Technology will always take us by surprise. To illustrate this point, Daglow showed a few screenshots from baseball games over the past three decades. In the 80s, it looked like someone "spilled something on the screen." In the 90s, you could finally see the form of the players. But now, the shadows, lighting, and surface textures are closer to real life than anyone back then could have imagined.

　　3. Today's developers should take pride in what they do. Great artists, Daglow said, are almost never appreciated in their own time. Just because people don't "get" games today doesn't mean you should put all you have into making them. A few decades down the line, games that are overlooked today by the public at large will be remembered fondly as the innovations they weren't considered at the time.

　　4. Emotions tend to distort history. What seems to be important today will often seem embarrassing down the line, and just like with the previous point, we often don't realize how a game will be perceived in the future.

　　5. Game interfaces are shaped by the culture around them. It's hard to say what games will look like in the future because such a big part of them (the interface) relies upon the changes in culture and people's ability to perceive and understand various imagery and functions. He used the example of how elevators used to have operators, but people learned to operate them manually, which then led to people's ability to operate elaborate multi-button input devices.

　　6. We the gaming public control the future. It's not the developers, publishers, critics or investors. The players determine what sinks or swims, and trying to read into the minds of millions of people is a tough job.

　　7. The rise of social gaming. Suddenly, games like Guitar Hero and most everything on the Wii has created a trend of games as a social venture.

　　8. The console wars will continue to wage on. Game companies are publicly traded, and as such they're always feeling the pressure from Wall Street to grow and expand their empire. This, in short, means they'll always be at odds with each other, never setting into a comfortable niche. Maybe with the exception of Nintendo. And on a related point…

　　9. The lifespan of consoles will grow. Systems have become more expensive to produce, so in order to make more profit, they need to be sold for a longer period of time. One thing that helps tremendously is that the trio of competitors now have been in place for eight year's time. At no point in the history of games have we seen the same companies engaged in a fight for so long. We don't need to worry about a rogue company coming in and launching a console early, forcing the big boys to match the pace.

　　10. The gap between core and casual gamers will shrink. For this we can thank digital distribution, which helps publishers reach out to both kinds of audiences. It helps narrow the gap between big budget retail games and free online games into games with a medium price tag whose size helps reduce complicated gameplay.

　　As you can tell, Daglow's "predictions of the future" were less predictions than they were ruminations on the history of the industry and a few important signs for where it may be headed. Maybe he didn't go out on a limb and describe what type of controller the PlayStation 7 will use, but it was a in interesting lesson in placing things in context.

　　You can listen to Daglow's entire panel right here.