When Terry Pratchett, bestselling author of the Discworld novels, needs to relax, only one thing will do. "Give me the speargun, the revolver and the shotgun," he says, "and turn me loose on an unknown world."
Pratchett is a videogame fan and he is not alone. The videogame business is big and burgeoning. In Ireland, Sony has shifted 3.5 million games in the past five years. Internationally, profit in this sector is now measured, like mass-market films, in terms of the first weekend's millions and over the six-weekend Christmas 1998 period, for example, Nintendo's Legend of Zelda grossed $160 million, well outpacing the most popular film, Disney's A Bug's Life. Sales of consoles and software in Europe and the US are expected to generate $17 billion worth of business by 2003. And that's before you factor in the playing cards, the posters, the clothes, the strategy and the plastic figurines. "Conventional media - Hollywood, music, even books - are scared," says Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy - the Inner Life of Videogames. "And who can blame them?"
Videogame players fall into three groups, says Niall O'Hanrahan, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ireland. There are passive gamers like himself: "I play the games when they come in here to the office and I'll play sometimes with the kids at home". There are the hardcore gamers, who play every day and keep on top of every new game that comes out. And there are social gamers, "when a group of students get together in a flat and have a PlayStation party with pizza and beer". When first conceived, videogames were considered a boy's pursuit but now games cost up to £50 and are targeted at the disposable income of adults. "Our customers are aged from six to 60, and beyond," says Hanrahan. "One of our best is a 66-year-old Corkwoman who buys a new game every month." The average age of videogame players worldwide is estimated to be 21, with 29 per cent aged 36 or over.
"Videogames have moved from being the favourite pursuit of anti-social teenagers locked into their bedrooms for hours on end," he says. "They have carved out their own niche within people's home entertainment pursuits and become a standard feature of leisure time for millions of people, not just kids." Poole agrees. For him, a music, chess and book lover, videogames are "just part of the cultural furniture". He discovered their attraction by accident, while reporting on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
"I was staying in a friend's flat while watching more or less disastrous pieces of Fringe theatre at the rate of three or four a day. The odorous broom-cupboard I was sleeping in had only one particularly interesting piece of furniture: a PlayStation. My friend introduced me to something called WipEout 2097, a fast futuristic hover-racing game . . . an amazing, sense-battering, physically thrilling trip." He was hooked and has been playing ever since. Poole wrote Trigger Happy as a paean to what he calls the "innerlife" of the games, their aesthetic and cultural value. He argues that videogames are not just fun but an artform. "Artistically, it [WipEout] felt superior to anything I had seen on the Fringe," he says.
"The original Greek meaning of `aesthetics' refers to things perceived by the senses. Modern videogames - dynamic and interactive fusions of colourful graphic representation, sound effects, music, speed and movement - are unquestionably a fabulously sensual form." Not everybody is so enamoured. Parents have reservations about the gruesome sights and sounds that emanate from videogame screens. Last year, while a shocked US public reeled at the Columbine High School shooting, explanation-seekers fastened on the fact that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two boys who opened fire on their schoolmates, were obsessive videogame-players. Their particular favourite was Doom, a 3-D game in which the player defends Mars from an alien invasion with a supersized shotgun.
Surely there was a link, the pundits suggested. Such logic annoys Poole. "People who can't tell the difference between videogame fiction and real life, like Harris and Klebold, are psychopaths and they might equally be set off by a film or a heavy-metal record played backwards. There's no accounting for nutters."
The evidence supports Poole's claim. News reports that posit a link between violent games and violent behaviour seldom stand up to close scrutiny. "For decades, scientists have tried to prove that video games are bad for your children," says Poole. "But there has never been any proof. Not a shred. Nada. Zip."
In fact, one 1997 study argues that videogames actually increase children's IQ and others demonstrate what's known as the "catharthis hypothesis": that playing violent games is actually a safe release for feelings of aggression. In many ways, these answers only beg more questions. Even if videogames do not incite real-life violence, why do they have to be violent at all, or at least so consistently? Are we really expected to feel no reservations about games such as Custer's Last Stand (tumescent male aims to dodge arrows and rape an Indian woman) or Soldier of Fortune (player required to keep track of kneecappings, headshots and groin wounds)? Videogames do not exist in a moral vacuum. Even Poole, who waxes lyrical about how he loves to "blow things asunder in beautiful showers of light", confesses to reservations about the way modern wars are increasingly fought and depicted through videogame-type graphical systems.
Some videogames companies, embarrassed about their relationship to war technology, are producing anti-war games, such as Metal Gear Solid, in which fewer guards killed means a higher score, but this is a minority response and likely to remain so. What videogames do best, Poole argues, is to provide an exhilarating blast of the most fundamental emotions: fear and triumph.
As the games become more established, their influence widens. Videogame companies have forged commercial links with football - paying stars such as Michael Owen and Alan Shearer to endorse their football games - and with rock music - Ash is rumoured to have earned £600,000 by licensing one song to the driving game, Gran Turismo.
They are also stretching their technological tentacles into the worlds of film and books: movie director George Lucas has his own videogames division, LucasArts; Sega put up a chunk of the budget for David Cronenberg's movie eXistenZ; Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton are just two novelists who write scenarios for games.
O'Hanrahan believes the influence of videogames is in its infancy. In October, Sony will launch PlayStation 2 in Ireland. It will be "backwardly compatible", he says "and will provide a complete home entertainment system" - which means it will still play the games you bought to play on PlayStation 1 and can also be used to play DVD movies and music CDs. Future developments will focus on such convergence.
Like or loathe them, videogames are no longer a minority enterprise serving children and geeks but a 30-year-old industry with wide-ranging influence. "It is an inevitable consequence of their extraordinary success that videogames will shape the world that we all inhabit tomorrow," says Poole. "They are rewiring our minds."
Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames by Steven Poole is published by Fourth Estate, £12 in UK
