Serious fun

A greasy adolescent sits cooped up in his fetid bedroom, glazed eyes fixed inches from the screen, planning his next bout of anti-social behaviour. This has long been the image many people conjure up when they think of video gaming. However, as a business now worth more than £500m annually and with a global reach more akin to traditional media such as films and music, the influence that gaming exerts extends well beyond the bedroom of your average spotty youth. It is time for gaming to be taken seriously.

The huge financial rewards that result from the development of hit video games and the rapid concurrent increases in gaming technology have not gone unnoticed. Other industries, as far removed from the archetypal games audience as could be imagined, are finding increasingly clever ways of piggy-backing on the video games sector’s technology breakthroughs.

The first ‘third generation’ of consoles, the Xbox 360, was launched by Microsoft last year and its rivals, Sony’s eagerly anticipated PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii, will be out this autumn. At the heart of the new PlayStation is the Cell microprocessor. Developed jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, Cell is a massive step up in processing power and its design was shaped by the unique demands of the next generation of gaming console.