The Man On The Street’s been playing a lot of pool this year.

Your reporter’s home town isn’t particularly spoiled for tolerable boozers with decent tables, but after much searching he finally located a pleasant environment with decent equipment, sensible house rules, non-ridiculous pricing (astoundingly, some pubs in Bath charge as much as £1.50 for a single game) and – best of all – a clientele largely uninterested in playing pool, leaving The Man On The Street and his chums free to monopolise the table.

On returning home, your correspondent attempted to recreate some of the atmosphere using videogames, and partly succeeded with the assistance of an emulator and an old pool game which played to a sampled soundtrack of pub noise and chatter. (And even, thanks to some sloppy playtesting, featured authentically-cheating opponents.)

And it got The Man On The Street to thinking, retail chums, and you know how happy you all are when that happens. And right on cue, here’s that thought - if even incompetent software developers can spot the link between drinking and gaming, how come nobody in the real world can?

It must be many years since this reporter last saw a videogame in a pub, with the exception of those weird touch-screen games with pictures of naked ladies on them. Certainly, the traditional cabinet-and-joystick games are a well and truly dead breed in the nation’s boozers, which may be partly due to the fact that 95% of arcade games nowadays are gigantic dedicated “simulators” which cost 15 grand and occupy about eight people’s-worth of drinking space, hence making them somewhat uneconomic for the average hostelry.

But why, retail buddies, isn’t the games business rushing to fill this glaringly-obvious gap, rather than leaving it to the touchscreen-smut pedlars? It doesn’t take an Einstein to put the pieces together. Game shops everywhere feature console demo pods - simple, secure and small constructions that would fit easily into a corner of your average pub. Drinkers are always hanging around, waiting on their friends to arrive, waiting for the pool table to be free, waiting for the big-screen football to start or whatever. So why aren’t we giving them something to do? If the industry is serious about attracting the grown-up gamer – as it’s always claiming to be – why isn’t it installing demo pods in pubs, rather than in game shops? After all, if someone’s in a game shop in the first place, chances are they were already thinking of buying a game, so why waste your time preaching to the converted?

Now, clearly you can’t have somebody playing Final Fantasy XII in your boozer all night. But a free-play demo pod, loaded up with time-limited demo games, makes sense for everyone. Drinkers get something to do when they’re bored. They might well stay in the pub longer, hence buying more drinks. And here’s the thing – if the demos are half-decent, they might want to buy the game as well. And why wait? Why not have a few copies under the counter ready to flog? Videogames don’t take up a lot of physical space, and the profit margin’s a lot better than it is on crisps and cigars. If we’re serious about selling games to the “post-pub” market, why not do the obvious thing and actually sell them to people who are already in the pub?

The Man On The Street has been struggling all weekend trying to think of reasons why it wouldn’t work. Console demo pods are tough and resilient, so they wouldn’t be tricky or expensive to maintain. Hardware manufacturers could easily afford to subsidise supply to publicans to ensure a good uptake. Putting consoles in front of adults when they’re in the pub would do more to ingrain them in people’s minds as legitimate, “normal” leisure culture than a hundred piss-poor ad campaigns featuring a marketing man’s idea of “cool” people playing games (and invariably looking like twats in the process). Publishers have to make demos anyway for games mags, so there’d be a steady supply of new stuff to keep players interested. Games are always more fun with multiple players, and by siting them in pubs you vastly increase the chances of gamers having human opponents to hand. And in selling punters the games the minute they want them, you solve the problem of them loving the game, resolving to buy it, and then forgetting the next morning when the shops are open but they’ve sobered up (or are lying in bed moaning with a hangover/the barmaid).

Honestly, is The Man On The Street the only person around here who has any ideas at all?