An anonymous commenter says that recent issues of Game Developer Magazine (*cough* founding editor *cough*) discussed multicore game programming and that, rather than divvying up logical areas like AI and physics, what today's developers are concentrating on is speeding up the world-render pipeline. That makes sense, given the graphical emphasis of most performance-related games. It also makes the difficulty of parallelism all that harder for the programmers, since there are so many dependencies in the data being shuttled between cores and the GPU. I guess my emphasis on things other than the graphical flash reveals what I wish game developers would work on, not the conservative "more triangles, more enemies, bigger levels" that is the truth of too much game design.