A feel for the game

If you are a PlayStation fan, on March 18 of 2020 you were likely confused, frustrated, bored, or some combination of the three. On that day, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect on the PlayStation 5, stood behind a lectern and, for an hour, delivered a live-streamed presentation titled "The Road to PS5." He rhapsodized about the ins-and-outs of computational power, and, at one point, solicited users for pictures of their ears. At that stage, the console itself hadn't been shown yet, and if the live chat accompanying the feed was any indication, the talk was not landing. Games were not being discussed, let alone shown. Most viewers likely zoned out around the sentence "33 CUs at 2.23 GHz is 10.3 teraflops." But that gobbledygook -- manifest through the marriage of hardware, firmware and software, with a pinch of authorial intent and creative vision -- meant a lot to developers. After all, the stream was a version of a presentation originally planned for this year's canceled Games Developers Conference, which in its original format would reach an audience of primarily developers and publishers.