Yesterday, we posted a story about the potential disruption to gaming that could result from the upcoming Steam Box from Valve. In a rare and candid interview, The Verge talks with Valve CEO Gabe Newell about his company’s gaming hardware, biometrics, gaze tracking and the future of gaming. Newell envisions an ecosystem of content developers, which will include the gamers themselves.

“Valve isn’t just attacking the living room; the Steam Box will be designed to work across multiple screens in the home using networking standards like Miracast, ideally allowing users to effortlessly transition between rooms and monitors to enjoy gaming and other content,” reports The Verge.

Would that sort of ecosystem be open or closed? “What we see is you’ve got this sort of struggle going on between closed proprietary systems and open systems,” says Newell. “We think that there are pluses and minuses to open systems that could make things a little messier, it’s much more like herding cats, so we try to take the pieces where we’re going to add the best value and then encourage other people to do it. So it tends to mean that a lot of people get involved.”

“We’re not imposing a lot of restrictions on people on how they’re getting involved,” he adds.

Users can expect a heavy focus on biometric data, according to Newell. “I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data,” he suggests. “Biometrics… is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important.”

He spoke on the company’s approach, which involves a theory of fun. “What is fun?” he asks. “How do we decide that expanding three menus on this is better or worse? So we came up with this rule, which is the more ways in which the game responds to a player’s state or player action is more fun.”

He expanded on the small details implemented to make gaming more fun: “In ‘Quake,’ you shot a wall and the wall basically ignored you. You saw a little puff, and then there’s no record of your actions. So we said using this simple rule, just one rule, if you shoot a wall it should change.”

Lastly, he touched on his hope for the future of the Steam Box. When asked if it would be successful, he said: “The Internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that’s actually worth people’s time, then they’ll adopt it. If you do something that’s not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won’t.”