It's especially odd now, since the Playstation upped the average age of gamers by about 8 years at a stroke - the demographic is now made up for the most part of the 20-something males, technology-literate and with high disposable incomes, who are every advertiser's favourite consumer. The industry turns over more cash than ever before, and is threatening to overtake all the more traditional forms of mass culture. So with all this money flying around, why doesn't TV seem to want any of it? I spoke to Dave Green, now a producer at Dot TV (satellite is very much the home of gaming TV, where the lack of pressure for mass-audience ratings gives more experimental programming a chance), but with a CV stretching across every area of the videogames and media fields, most recently as presenter of BBC Radio 1's The Digital Update. No-one seemed better placed to offer an insight into the mindset of the nation's broadcasting mandarins, and sure enough, there were a few shocks in store.

CTW: This is a bit of a strange situation, isn't it? Aren't games a really obvious thing to put on TV? Visual, noisy, fast-moving, trendy...

DG: Oddly, no. The basic perception of games on TV is that they should be
entertainment, and the unfortunate fact is that, in the vast majority of
cases, watching people play games is simply not that entertaining. There's
at least two reasons for this. Firstly, games are more fun to play than to watch. TV likes people and action, preferably together, and someone sitting near-motionless in front of a monitor doesn't deliver this purely because all the action is either all on the screen, or in their head. Equally, there are few
good movies about games or computers in general, mainly because using them looks so boring. And secondly, games look terrible.

CTW: What? Surely not?

DG: Contentious, I know, but first of all it's true on technical grounds - they just don't produce the same resolution as broadcast video or film. Also, they're much easier to understand (and more fun) when you're playing them. If you work in the business, you don't realise this, because you're used to playing games, you can work out what's going on, by your standards they look fine - to a non-gamer, they look like a load of badly filmed coloured blobs bouncing around in a largely pointless sport for which they don't understand the rules. Would you rather watch football matches from
a "Sensible Soccer tiny little moving dots" perspective? Of course not, but
if you're controlling the dots, that's fine.

CTW: This might have been true before, but surely it isn't now? Banjo-Kazooie,
Resident Evil 2, Gran Turismo, ISS 98... these are all colourful, realistic and
exciting to look at, no?

DG: Visually they might be impressive, but looking at the games themselves at their current stage isn't emotionally involving from a pure spectator's point of view. Banjo, RE2, whatever, barely have any dialogue, facial expressions, plot, goals, varied behaviour, nor (indeed) make any sense at all unless you're actually playing them - they're appallingly primitive visual entertainment compared to even the most basic cartoons. What would you rather watch, Animaniacs, Road Runner, or Banjo in
demo mode? And for all the fuss made about Lara Croft, in the game she doesn't even have any dialogue or facial expressions. Again, it's hard to sympathise with a flat-faced expressionless character no matter how amusing their antics, as anyone who saw the first series of Simon Mayo's Confessions will agree.

CTW: Does this explain the otherwise-mystifying decision by the BBC to concentrate all their resources in this most visual of media on radio programmes, then?

DG: Sort of. The thing is, on radio - wait for it - the pictures are better. Someone actively has to describe what they're doing, how they're feeling, basically what the bloody hell is going on - they can't rely on the visuals to carry it for them. So you get some kind of emotional interest, which is what broadcasters want.

CTW: Well, that's the BBC out, then. But ITV-wise, isn't the gaming audience exactly the kind of people advertisers are gagging for - youngish, technology-literate, high disposable income?

DG: Well, you could say that about music shows - also, a notoriously difficult format to get right. And while Edge and Official Playstation and The Face witter on to each other about how gaming has grown up, they're obviously preaching to the converted (their own readers - and each other), and mass media perception of gaming is still that it's a kids' (well, teenagers') thing. Consequently, you're never going to see adults seriously discussing (or playing) video games on TV - it would be as embarrassing as them discussing their favourite Power Ranger.

CTW: But with a circulation speeding past 300,000, isn't something like OPSM getting dangerously close to "mass media"? That is, after all, higher than the
top-selling mags of many other forms of culture that get tons of telly, including music, film, football and cars. (In fact, I can't offhand think of ANY other single-issue publications with a higher sale, unless you count something like Radio Times).

DG: OPSM's always going to be a specialist mag, and the reason
it sells so many is because it's the only thing with a PlayStation disc on
the front - it would be the same if you could stranglehold /any/ moderately
popular hobby; imagine how many Q would sell if it was the only music
magazine that had a free sampler CD every issue (and only 20 albums were
released per month).

CTW: So if big numbers aren't enough, what does the games business have to do to achieve this grown-up mass-media respectability?

DG: They need to be perceived as an important, non-minority interest. They say "Oh, Resident Evil 2 took more than Men In Black on its UK release" but RE2 costs 10 times more than going to the cinema - therefore 10 times more people usually see films, and you're 10 times more likely to be able to have a conversation with someone about a film than about a game you've both played. Maybe most people have heard of Tomb Raider (unlikely) but very few actually care about the game (or what Lara Croft would do next) in the same way they might about Harrison Ford. Or pop stars. Or genuine celebrities. Or whatever.

CTW: But surely, fundamentally, watching something like RE2 in play isn't that far away from watching, say, Scream 2?

DG: Actually, it is - Scream has a proper script and actors who do lots of different things instead of immobile-faced polygons who just shoot one zombie after another. I'm being harsh here but Virgin did a cinema-style trailer for RE2 and that's literally all that happened in it - even John Woo films have more going on than that

CTW: You're painting a bleak picture here. I mean, for all the difficulty of doing, say, a good contemporary music show, people keep trying. I can't think of a
period of time in the last 20 years when there haven't been at least 2 mainstream dedicated music shows on regularly. Currently there are three or four, all on effectively permanent runs.

DG: Not on ITV any more, not after "The Roxy"... I'd go out on a limb and say you won't ever see a games show on ITV in a non-kids slot, simply because their peak slots are too valuable and filled with flagship current affairs, drama, and soaps. ITV can't even schedule tried-and-tested formats like sitcoms properly, so I'd say the main hope lies with BBC2 or C4 - or maybe C5, who've shown remarkable keenness for cheap programming, though they tend to be more populist. It sounds like what you'd like, Stu, is a Fantasy Football-style semi-late-night gaming chat show which I think /could/ work - all it would need would be some moderately charismatic adults, which of course the games biz is famous for.

CTW: We're screwed, aren't we?

DG: Gamesmaster obviously pioneered a lot of attempts at making games TV-friendly - celebs, punchy delivery etc. At the same time, with all the puerile and sexist gags, it helped stereotype TV video gaming as a kids' thing. The problem there, though, is much bigger than can be laid entirely at their door.

It would certainly appear so. And yet, while it may be the case that games are a long way from achieving any kind of proper grown-up mainstream respectability or acceptance in TV terms, the games audience is surely still a big enough one to justify /some/ kind of show aimed at the niche market. At the moment, there's absolutely nothing out there at all, and I can't think of a single other minority interest of anything like the same size that's so comprehensively ignored.