And yet, while you wouldn't want to play, buy or stock any of it, Sony's first salvo in their fledgling attempt at moving the Playstation away from being a pure games machine towards being an all-encompassing mainstream home entertainment device is clear statement of an intent that we should all be sitting up and paying attention to. Because this time, unlike with Make Your Own Video, Art Alive!, Mario Paint and all the rest of them, the video game that isn't a game isn't going to go away.

The industry's continual tired bemoaning of the fact that girls don't buy video games is a hoary old story that's older and hoarier than a hoary old whore. Yet for all the weasel words constantly spouted, the business' best stab at attracting women so far is to give them a "positive role model" in the shape of a slim and pretty posh chick who runs around wearing a rucksack, filled not, as you might think, with adventuring tools, but with bricks to stop her from toppling forward under the weight of her own ridiculous cleavage. As a joke for social-contact-starved programmers, they're all very well, but Lara's tits don't, whatever Core might try to tell you, represent a new feminist economic manifesto for the fairer sex to buy into. On the other hand, it's a well-documented fact that, while boys like to shoot things and hit things and blow things up, girls like to build things and manipulate things and emotionally interact with them. Having a little cartoon Sporty Spice say "Hi!" and then taking her through some dance steps might sound a bit too close to playing with dollies for comfort, to males brainwashed by an endless diet of gore-splattered beat-'em-ups and muscle-car-bound racers, but it represents a level of emotional engagement that, embarrassingly rudimentary as it is, astoundingly few games (outside of the ironically gore-drenched Resident Evil, anyway) have so far come anywhere near.

The new breed of non-game games isn't just about attracting women, of course, though there's no doubt that it's the most serious attempt so far at capturing a market game publishers have drooled wistfully over for years (without ever plucking up the courage to actually go and chat it up). Despite recent soaring sales, gaming is still very much a minority interest, even among males. The numbers we've been seeing of late are less to do with a wider range of public acceptance than they are to do with the fact that there are simply more people alive now with experience of, and interest in, games than there used to be - thanks in significant part to the healthy retrogaming scene, the people who would normally have simply grown out of gaming and been replaced by a new generation of console-buying teens have stuck around, splashing out chunks of their newly-lavish disposable income and boosting the figures that used to be reliant almost entirely on Granny's Christmas money. But that still leaves the large majority of the public for whom videogames still means "Space Invaders", and whose willingness to suspend their disbelief and throw themselves into the strange, juvenile universe still inhabited by most gamers is, at best, reluctant and limited. These are the people who couldn't even begin to get their heads around even the relatively simple and welcoming world of Super Mario 64 (let alone do it with the bizarre, straight-out-of-Star Trek N64 controller), but, perhaps round a mate's house one night after the pub, found that they could identify with the extraordinarily simple "when the light flashes, hit the button" gameplay mechanics of Parappa The Rapper and suddenly found themselves doing something they'd never even imagined - playing with a games console. Almost overnight, there were millions of potential, genuinely new, consumers for Playstation software. Suddenly, the long-elusive future where everyone was a potential gamer just like everyone now is a potential music listener or movie watcher stopped seeming like pie in the sky and started to seem like an attainable goal.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, to the likes of Sony (who from the word "go" have taken a rather broader perspective on the possibilities of the games market than any of the previous "giants") it's these new consumers who hold the key to the future. Because the thing that no-one seems to have (publically, at least) noticed about existing gamers is, they're already being squeezed until the pips squeak. However dramatic your new hardware developments, however extensive your software catalogue, however many front covers of style magazines you get, by and large gamers are already spending as much money on games as they can afford. Bring out half-a-dozen world-beating new games and all you'll achieve is to consign four or five of them to failure, because however much they'd like to buy them all, practically no-one spends £250 a month on video games. Financially speaking, the existing market is all but saturated (and indeed, has been for years, with the largely new consumers already attracted by the PS the only reason things have continued to grow as long as they have).

It's perhaps slightly disturbing that the last few months have seen a long stream of industry figures appearing in the pages of CTW and gloomily prophesying an "inevitable" bust at the end of the current boom. This received wisdom is widely held as gospel, and the shaky state of many of the world's economies in general has added much fuel to the fire. And yet, is it necessarily the case at all? At a time when many Japanese CEOs have been leaping from the windows of their corporate skyscrapers, Sony and Nintendo have posted record-breaking profits. The Playstation seems on the brink of breaking through the glass ceiling and making the leap to VCR-style penetration levels (yet another reason why the notion of PS2 not being backwards-compatible would seem, to your simple-minded correspondent, such uncharacteristic drop-the-ball-two-yards-from-the-end-zone insanity on Sony's part).

But if the bust is to be bodyswerved and the current growth to be maintained, then a very large part of the responsibility for that will be placed on the shoulders of more titles like Spice World. ("There's definitely more music-related stuff on the way, more products in development that are creativity-based, either in the sound or vision fields," says Sony's Pete Devery. "There'll be more stuff from Japan like Bust-A-Groove and Fluid - the whole concept is big over there, they're much more prepared to just take a chance and see what happens with slightly more out-there ideas.") And after the sales successes of Parappa, Spice World and Fluid (despite mostly mediocre reviews, the dolphin-based music maker sold almost 10,000 copies in the UK, some way in excess of Sony's predictions), there are plenty of other companies prepared to jump on the bandwagon and have a go too - Codemasters (with the snappily-titled Music) and Konami (with odd DJ-'em-up Beatmasters) are almost certainly just the first of a wave. It beats trying to force yet another second-rate Tomb Raider clone through the crowd, anyway.