Next Generation has up a lengthy article about the history of touch interaction in games. Above and beyond the obvious, like the DS or the touch panel table demonstrated last year, they also explore concepts like physical interaction in adventure games like Myst. "The popular growth of videogames has been more or less tied to a minimization of distance, and an increase in tangibility; making the player feel like he can touch the world, and that doing so will matter. It makes sense, right? Make people feel actively involved, and they will actively involve themselves. As developers have piled on the abstractions - more buttons, more unspoken conventions, a more confusing perspective - and reveled in the already-existing distance, videogames have passively sunk into their niche, to appeal only to those familiar enough to overlook and accept the abstractions."

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