Games typically present an integrated gaming experience. By integrated, I mean either a single chracter or a single POV or a single purpose and so on. The trend for business software, however, is in the opposite direction; multitasking is the viewed as the solution to business pressures. Observing this difference, what implications are there? Should game design move towards multitasking? Is there a middle ground? Just what are the two systemic approaches trying to encompass?

If you are referring to multi-threaded games, this is a good idea but performance-wise you will get no hit whatsoever over single threaded unless your box has more than one CPU.

Traditionally, multi-threaded apps are useful when the program is spending a lot of time waiting around for devices or input or something and the CPU has a lot of free cyles sitting there doing nothing. Also, its useful when you want to run some critical IO code, but allow the user to interact with the program at the same time (ie. one thread doing the GUI, another doing the IO etc.). In the case of games, you know the renderer is going to be working flat out from frame to frame (you want your FPS as high as possible), so its going to eat up any free CPU cycles anyway.

I can see instances where threading AI in games would be useful, given that GPUs are becomming more and more like that second processor - but this only really makes sense on multi-processor machines (2 or more CPUs). When eventually we hit the quantum barrier with component shrinking (if such a thing happens), then expect to see multi-processor machines becomming more common.

I think he was talking about multitasking from a gameplay perspective rather than a programming structure (multi-threaded) view. A lot of games (mostly strategy games) already do this, for other games it wouldn''t work too well, even though there has been an FPS where you control multiple characters (4 way split screen). You could create an interesting game with multitasking, you just need to make sure the interface doesn''t get too cluttered. It''s not the final solution to game interfaces, but it would an interesting thing to experiment with.