Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Talks About Microsoft's Mixed-Reality Future

Take the short view and Microsoft's annual E3 showcase was a classic power play. The company unveiled its long-anticipated Xbox One X, a kind of console supercomputer capable of rendering native 4K visuals at higher, stabler frame rates than Sony's own boutique PS4 Pro. But consider the longer view, as Xbox honcho Phil Spencer must, and what it means to play games becomes a much stranger jumble of iterative concepts, a spiraling helix of creative and commerce driven forces rapidly converging on the dissolution of the borderlands between what we define as real and imagined. TIME spoke with Spencer about the company's current and future plans, including backward compatibility (the company announced Xbox original games coming soon to all Xbox One devices), the criticality of Xbox Live (its online games service) and finally the timescale for general consumer adoption of mixed reality products. Here's what he told us.