The computer games market is growing in volume and sophistication, writes Karlin Lillington.

To most people - at least, most adults - computer games may seem like child's play. But Mr Jon Orwant, an American working in the gaming research and development section of France Telecom's Boston office, would like to argue otherwise.

Mr Orwant is passionate about games. "It's my hope that games will soon be included with first-tier media" like books, films and magazines, he says with fervour. He took his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999 in automated program generation for games, he teaches gaming programming and design at MIT, he worked for a games publisher for a while, and is now thinking about mobile gaming for France Telecom.

On a visit this week to Dublin's Media Lab Europe, a spin-off of MIT's Media Lab, he outlined the statistics for this growing sector, which rivals the film industry in scale. Most gamers are 35 years or older, he says, while another 28 per cent are 18 to 35, and another 13 per cent are over 50.

He notes that the figures are from a gaming industry marketing organisation, the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association, and thus need to be viewed with some scepticism. For example, he suspects the 50-plus crowd are playing "games" like computer bridge and solitaire, not gory shoot 'em ups or the latest strategy game. But the trend is clear. There's a big, big market for adult gamers who see a high-quality immersive game as an alternative activity to catching a film.

The film industry comparison has become almost a gaming cliché at this point. But figures do give a sense of the scale of the market: games gathered in $8.2 billion (€7.75 billion) in revenue in 2000, compared to $7.75 billion for films (Mr Orwant notes again that gaming marketing groups are only talking about US box office receipts; the figures would alter in the film industry's favour if international box office take and sales of film DVDs, videos and soundtracks were added in).

But Mr Orwant says the top grossing game title is Grand Theft Auto, with $350 million in sales. "If it were a film, it would have been the seventh-biggest grossing film of all time," he notes.

He finds film industry comparisons useful for understanding similarities between the industries, which he thinks helps point towards the future of gaming over the next 15 years, as well as highlighting some of the gaming industry's biggest challenges.

To start with, there's the cost of making a game - an average of $10 million compared to $100 million to make a film. A film may be more expensive but the huge expenses involved in game-making still mean that publishers are reluctant to try anything new, which makes the immediate future of the gaming industry look a bit dry. "They'll only back a game if it's already like a game that's already out there," says Mr Orwant.

Those costs also mean that games, like films, tend to be produced by a few big studios that can raise the needed capital. Mr Orwant says each industry has to work with ratings groups.

He also says soundtracks have become an important feature of both films and games. At one point, game soundtracks were limited to sound effects for the action. Now, more games are learning from the big mid-1990s best-seller Myst, which had a moody soundtrack for the various locations a player visits in the game, and "games are increasingly becoming reliant on soundtracks", says Mr Orwant.

As with films, game players are drawn into a marketing world built around a game, which might include a soundtrack, T-shirts and other items.

"Another thing that's just emerging in games is product placement," he says. He points to the game Sims Online, which sold product placement deals to Intel and McDonald's valued at $1 million each. Sims characters, whose lives and actions players control, can order a Big Mac, run a McDonalds and get a PC with an Intel chip inside.

Far from being critical of this move, Mr Orwant is thrilled. "I think this is a brilliant, brilliant thing - not just for the Sims but for McDonald's and Intel. You can't get people to watch advertisements any more. And product placement in movies is still a relatively passive thing - maybe you noticed that Coke can in the last Scorsese film, maybe you didn't.

"McDonald's and Intel are getting people to interact with their products. For 80 to 100 hours players are interacting with this game." Such product advertising is a sure and lucrative element of gaming's future, he predicts.

Mr Orwant believes games "have a lot of promise as educational vehicles, I want to say, tools to think with. I think anything can be turned into a game - fun can be added on." That means many of the activities we find dull - doing our taxes, for example - could have a gaming element rolled in.

He says the single most popular lesson he taught at MIT was one where students had to design a game around "the most boring topics I could think of".

He says the US military is an example of an organisation using gaming in a serious way. It has a specially designed "shoot 'em up" game that has become a tool for attracting graduates into the military and for simulating battle environments for personnel. He offers an interesting list of the "obvious game design rules" he gives to students, including:

have more than one way to win;

hide the details of real life;

create pride through instant replays;

create lore for the game through "easter eggs" (surprise elements in a game that appear if a player types in a particular code or does a particular action);

build in cheats (short-cuts or actions to make the game easier).

He also has what he calls "my non-obvious list":

use sounds emotively;

create emotional attachment by forcing players to view the back story (the "history" of the characters and story before the moment at which the game is placed).

The last element is a very successful feature of most Japanese games, he says.

His predictions for gaming's future? Between 2005 and 2007, games will diversify, and product placement will increase. From 2007 to 2009, games will begin to move to television set-top boxes, and, due to better game design software programs, even relatively unskilled programmers will be able to create games. From 2009 to 2015 he sees the return of the "indie game designers".

And from 2015 to 2020? Those years sum up his gaming philosophy: "It's my hope and belief that games will become a dominant cultural force."