Computer games revenue is catching up with cinema

Computer games are not just big business. Within the past year, they have become very big business indeed. Revenues, at about $5.5 billion (£3.7 billion) in 1997, now nearly total those of the film industry, at $5.7 billion.

Nonetheless, industry analysts estimate that game publishers only reach about 15 per cent of their prospective audience of children and adults. That elusive remaining 85 per cent, which generally prefer to spend their entertainment budget on books, films, television, videos, sports events - just about anything besides dungeon and dragon adventures, virtual space conquest, gory digital shoot-em-ups or just a quiet game of computerised golf - are a crowd many developers would love to reach.

Who the 85 per cent are, why they don't play games, and how to reach them, quickly became one of the major topics of debate at an unusual three-day gamers "think tank" event held at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. At the government-supported arts and business centre set in some of Canada's most magnificent scenery high in the Canadian Rockies, some 35 leading game designers, digital theorists, artists, writers and technologists were invited to ponder and probe the current state of the gaming industry.

"The idea was to bring together people who normally don't ever talk to each other, like game designers, theorists and writers," said Mr Josh Portway, an organiser of the weekend, and a game designer, animator and artist who directs projects for musician Peter Gabriel's Real World Multimedia near Bath.

From the first session of the first day, the challenges and frustrations of defining and reaching a larger audience - even reaching a receptive audience now distracted by a tidal wave of gaming titles flooding the market - became a recurrent theme.

One problem, said many developers and game designers, is the way in which games are marketed. "I actually hate even the term `game'," said Mr David Braben, managing director of game company, Frontier Developments Ltd in Cambridge. In 1984, Mr Braben co-created Elite, considered by gaming enthusiasts to be a classic that spawned the entire space games genre. According to Mr Braben, the word "game" alienates non-gaming converts. Like many at the event, he sees games more broadly as immersive environments, but dislikes that term as well.

Even dividing games into genres was seen by most participants as problematical. For marketing purposes, the large conglomerates which publish games like to slot games into specific genres like "shooters", strategy games, adventure games, role playing games (or RPGs), and simulations such as golf and football. Gaming magazines generally classify games by genre as well: "The readers seem to feel it's very helpful in finding what they want," said Mr Johnny Wilson, editor of US games magazine Computer Gaming World.

But Mr Braben feels an addiction to genres stymies creativity, forcing games developers to produce clones of already-successful games. "Publishers are reluctant to take on a game if you can't, in one line, explain what that game is," he says. "A lot of games have fallen between the stools."

Ironically, the games which challenge existing genres tend to be those rare breakthrough products - the ones which sell to non-gamers, cross age boundaries, and appeal to women, who normally make up less than 5 per cent of a typical game's audience. One developer cited popular games like Myst, Sim City, and Tetris as those which went outside the typical market and on to establish new genres.

Two forces are working to discourage innovation in the games industry, according to the event's participants. First, like much of the technology industry, games companies are consolidating. The resultant behemoths want reliable hits. And second, the sheer cost of creating and marketing technologically-demanding games engenders a reluctance to experiment with new gaming forms. According to Mr Stewart Kosoy, an executive games producer at MGM Interactive in Los Angeles, on average it takes $2.5 million to design a game and another $2.5 to $3 million to market it.

He knows about the difficulties of pitching an unusual genre-breaking game firsthand. After years of turning down games, as a producer, which he thought were too risky, he now has a decidedly different game in which the players take on the roles of sharks, dolphins and whales. He demonstrated the game to general approval but admitted that even he was getting a wary response from potential publishers.

Yet he believes the game is a potential boundary-crosser which will appeal to that hidden 85 per cent of the market. It was created as a response to the question, "What is the nature of play that appeals to the broader market?" he said.

Some game designers argued that the computer itself still mediates against the kind of total immersion which might draw in a wider gaming audience. "The screen's too flat and safe and the mouse is too pathetic [as an interface]," argued Real World Multimedia's Mr Portway.

In addition, he thinks many games have bloated into complicated products which focus too much on the latest technologies and befuddling sets of rules and constraints, rather than on sharp game-play. "The games I find interesting have a small set of rules which blossom into all sorts of complexity," he said.

Designers like Mr Braben say they are committed, even within a generally hostile publishing environment, to creating the games which they hope will shatter definitions and convince the non-gamers to become fans of sound cards, joysticks, keyboards and screens.

But for now, it's still wait-and-see. With the Christmas buying season approaching, traditionally a crucial, lucrative spending period for the gaming industry, few prospective offerings already heavily hyped in the gaming press seem set to try and push the limits of existing genres, much less invent new ones.

Karlin Lillington is at karlin@indigo.ie