My number one next gen gaming wish

One of the things Atari's most recent Alone in the Dark did well, other than destroying a much-loved brand, was find a way to have menus without actually having menus. Instead, you get to look inside Edward Carnby's coat. This is more interesting than it sounds. Less salacious, too.

Carnby's coat - a rather dapper leather number, since you ask - is the Alone in the Dark inventory. Thanks to the magic of sewn-in straps, it holds everything you could possibly need to overcome a demon invasion - medispray, a bottle of diesel, a cigarette lighter, a pistol, flashlight, the works. And some cheerily unreal button prompts aside, it achieves this without removing you from the world. There's no experiential break, no gap between Alone in the Dark's apocalyptic recreation of Central Park and the tools you'll need to survive.

If only the game as a whole weren't such a shambles. Thankfully, EA's considerably superior Dead Space does something very similar. Visceral's brilliant riffing on the age-worn techno-trappings of the Alien films includes a smart reimagining of interface, where menus are projected before your character as holograms. It doesn't stop there - ammo counts, health bars and crosshairs are similarly projected, mapped onto objects, rather than floating on the surface of the screen. Result: the fiction feels more complete, more natural, less fictional. It's an approach many developers could learn from, and one too many developers ignore.

Just look at Skyrim. The game's fold-out menu system is a massive improvement on Oblivion's, but it's still bothersome, intruding the fact of the game's being a game on you whenever you top up your health or change your gear. Bethesda had the foresight to do away with character classes this time round - if only they'd gone further, found a way to collapse the inventory's tedious architecture into the environment. A difficult task? Sure - you'll handle literally thousands of items while exploring Skyrim. But an impossible one? I sincerely doubt it.

Like the concept of multiple lives (read: credits), menus are a structure borne of specific historical circumstances - in this case, hardware limitations. They're a way of summarising and organising a game's complexities without asking the impossible of programmers and artists. But today's machines have the grunt to do without them. All it takes is clever execution. If there's one thing I'm hoping for from next generation gaming, it's gaming trappings that compliment, rather than cut against the fantasy. How do you think design needs to evolve?