Over at Slashdot, they have featured a short Q&A session with Sony Computer Entertainment honcho, Phil Harrison. In spite of his busy schedule, he managed to thoroughly answer the readers' inquiries...that says a lot about him, right? The questions range from the personal (how he got into the business), the interesting (the homebrew scene and the rumble feature for the SIXAXIS), and the deep (gaming philosophy).

Let's focus with the interesting bits, shall we? Anonymous Coward, maynard, and flitty asked him this question - "if someone manages to get homebrew games running on the PS3, will there be firmware updates?... How does this strategy differ your strategy with PSP homebrew?" To that, he says:

I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone...It's a vital, crucial aspect of the future growth of our industry and links well to the subtext of my earlier answers. When I started making games on the Commodore 64 in the 1980's...I might share this with a few friends but not for commercial gain at that time. But the process itself was invaluable in helping me learn to program, to design graphics, animations or sounds and was really the way I opened doors to get into the industry.

Now, those industry doors are largely closed by the nature of the video game systems themselves being closed. So, if we can make certain aspects of PS3 open to the independent game development community, we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent. Now having said all that, we still have to protect the investment and intellectual property rights of the industry so we will always seek the best ways to secure and protect our devices from piracy and unauthorized hacking that damages the business.