SEQUEL IN A TOILET
I know it's serious

This is the keynote speech I gave on the opening day of the inaugural  Game On exhibition at the Barbican arts centre in London in May 2002 (the exhibition has since toured the world, and as far as I know is still doing so). Three of us spoke in the gallery's lecture theatre - developer and hugely lovely industry uncle Charles Cecil, myself, and then a woman whose name and identity I've since embarrassingly forgotten. I think she was some sort of psychologist. My piece addressed the wider cultural and artistic merit of gaming in 2002, a theme I've subsequently returned to here on WoS. It went down pretty well on the day, generating most of the questions in the Q&A session that followed, and looking back I'm fairly pleased with the accuracy/foresight of the speech a hardware generation later, especially with regard to the PC and handheld markets. The Barbican, I established in my short introductory preamble, has really small toilets.

If you were to hold this exhibition again 20 years from now, looking back over the period from now until then, chances are that it wouldn't occupy the 2000 square feet of floorspace it's using today. The chances are that you could do it perfectly adequately in one of the cubicles in the toilets. Because if the games industry continues along its current path, you’d only need to show the visitors about six games. There’d be a fighting game, a racing game, a Tomb Raider-style 3D adventuring game, a football game, a resource-management strategy game and a role-playing game. Around you there are hundreds of different videogames, but more than that, most of them represent different ideas. And at the moment, ideas are what the videogames industry is right out of.