Why don’t we take games seriously?

Reporting on the BAFTA awards for video games, Media Guardian notes that the UK games industry is a £2 billion-a-year business [free registration required to read the article]. It’s an industry that’s ignored at best and mocked at worst, and yet it’s bigger than the UK film industry (worth £1.42 billion in 1999; I can’t find more recent figures) and almost half the size of the UK music business (£5bn per year). Globally it’s even bigger: to take just one example, Halo 2 racked up $100 million in sales in just 24 hours.

Mark Rawlinson, deputy director general of the trade body ELSPA, says:

“It is our desire that games will start to be reviewed alongside music, books, films and theatre and not be confined to the techie pages. They’re about entertainment, art and culture.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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