The Man On The Street couldn’t find a single new game he wanted to play all over Christmas and New Year. Apart from a purely-out-of-duty spin on The Getaway, none of your reporter’s consoles saw a power light all through the holidays. I’d set aside a few especially – Ratchet & Clank, Vice City, Unreal Championship, Starfox, Deus Ex – but when it came to it, I just couldn’t be arsed booting any of them up. Partly it was because every one represented the beginning of at least a 20-hour quest, which just seemed like a terrible chore. And partly it was because this correspondent had seen all of them before. Every one a sequel, in concept if not in name, and in fact most of them part of a long line of sequels. And viewers, the older you get, the less time you want to spend repeating things you’ve already done over and over again with new graphics.

Of course, “I’m fed up of games” isn’t exactly a new complaint. Everyone has their own cycles of interest, and there’s usually something on the horizon that can be counted on to refire the enthusiasm. This reporter’s biggest blow was that he was expecting it to be the Gamecube and its new Mario game, and with both proving a massive let-down it suddenly seemed to get a lot harder to be excited. But anyway. This isn’t “Diary Of  A Miserable Git Part 267”. There was a point, and it’s coming up right now.

Games are controlled by fat old men. Vastly more than in any other field of leisure, it’s impossible to create a significant videogame without the approval of fat old men. Want to write the world’s most exciting novel? Go ahead and do it, then. It’ll cost next to nothing to do, and if it’s any good at all, someone somewhere will publish it. Want to shake up the music world with the next generation of rock’n’roll? You can do it in your bedroom with a PC, burn the CDs yourself, and get them played on the radio the same week. If people like them, watch record companies beat a path to your door. (Or just flog a few yourself and use the proceeds to finance the next lot, etc. Plenty of No.1 records got published this way.)

Stand-up genius? Every comedy club in the land has open-mike spots, off you go. Make ‘em laugh and you’ll be on the paid circuit in no time. Or if the written chuckle is your forte, bung it on a website. Onion/TV Go Home-style franchising and riches await. Even if movies are your love, discounting the tired old Blair Witch Project example, all you really need to get going is a screenplay, and that’s even easier to come up with than a book 

All of these creative outlets are accessible to just about anyone. Very little in the way of technical skills or training is required. If you’ve got the spark of inspiration, you can get it onto the medium with the minimum of difficulty, and in an instantly commercial-quality condition. Straight from your brain to the shelves of HMV, and no fat old men required anywhere along the line.

Games are different. It’s all but impossible for anyone except a millionaire to self-create a game of even vaguely commerially-competitive quality. And even in the microscopic number of cases where someone’s come up with a cheap hit (Tetris and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire being probably the only two true examples in the last decade or so, and the latter barely qualifies since it was someone else’s idea and had to be bought in at extortionate cost), you still need to be filthy rich to get it to the public, because you have to pay hardware companies massive sums up front to use their hardware, both in licence-fee terms and in the monopolistically-inflated costs of producing for their unique proprietory formats. In other words – you need fat old men.

Would you let your dad choose which records you listened to? Would you let your school headmaster decide which books and magazines you read, or which movies you went to see? Of course not. It’s a laughable idea. And yet it’s exactly the situation we’re stuck with with games. You know why the industry has Roger Bennett (60-odd, white-haired, unlikely to have played a videogame since Pong) as its number one spokesman? Because he’s the coolest guy they’ve got. The industry’s other big public figures? Peter Molyneux, a grown-up geek, who’s probably so fascinated with toilets because he spent his schooldays getting his head flushed down them. J Allard, a sad corporate twit pretending he’s 20 years younger than he is because he’s got a skateboard. And, um... well, that’s us pretty much out of high-profile industry figureheads.

And who actually runs the show? The likes of Yamauchi, a crotchety old Japanese grandad. Sony’s Chris Deering, aka Mr Burns from The Simpons. And Bill Gates, King Of All The Nerds. Fat old men, in nature if not in waistline. Look at the head of any games publisher and you’ll find the same, only fatter and stupider. Release schedules read like the playlist at a wedding where Smashie and Nicey are DJing. More of the same, middle of the road, nothing to frighten the horses, steady as she goes. And hey, EVERYBODY loves Hi Ho Silver Lining, don’t they? Death to the fat old men.