If Videogames Are to Become As Popular As Tv They Need to Exploit Our Humblest Fantasies

Stop picking your backside, you disgusting little pauper; you vile, impoverished speck with your moth-eaten trousers and your brittle, worn-out hair; stop floundering in your own muck for a moment to gawp in humble, awed astonishment at me and my jet-set lifestyle.

Last week, I spent the evening at a glittering Bafta awards ceremony in London's glamorous West End. On the face of it, this sounds like precisely the sort of thing your average Heat reader would willingly slice a thumb off (then fry it and eat it) to attend. Except it wasn't honoring movies or soaps or the Top 100 Baked Bean-colored Wags or anything like that. It was celebrating the video games industry. At which point, your average Heat reader probably shrugs and turns the page. It might as well be celebrating the UK's foremost curtain rod manufacturers, for all they care.

The glitzy lifestyle mags don't cover the games industry, because there aren't any identifiable personalities to shake a narrative stick at. Sonic the Hedgehog and Lara Croft are never going to go through heartbreak hell together. The Tetris blocks don't get drunk and punch photographers. The most compelling character in any video game is you, the player. And apart from you, who ultimately gives a toss about you anyway? Even God doesn't care. That's why he gave you that nose.

The resulting lack of mainstream coverage means that, despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride. Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It's like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king.

Anyway, outperforming other media is one thing. Widespread affection from the populace is another. And the majority of video games are still off-puttingly abstruse as far as the average schmoe is concerned. As a lifelong nerd, I often forget this myself, and will excitingly hand over a game pad to a greenhorn visitor, encouraging them to "have a quick go" on some new release with the promise that it's "easy" and "intuitive", only to spend the next half-hour trying to explain that "you have to press X to open the door ... press X ... that's the blue button with an X on it ... no, you can't climb that tree in the background, it's just a bit of decoration - look, you just can't, so stop trying - oh ... you've accessed the inventory now ... the inventory, that's what you're carrying ... no, you've gone back to the menu now ... oh for Christ's sake, just give it here. Just get out and leave me alone ... "

But things are changing. The biggest growth area in video games right now is the "casual gaming" market. For "casual", read "mainstream". Effectively, this means games the average human being can relate to: anyone who's lived in a house can grasp what The Sims is, for instance; anyone who's played tennis knows how to swing a Nintendo Wii remote. Grand Theft Auto might not look like a casual game, but it certainly appeals to a wide demographic, namely anyone who's ever fantasised about going berserk in a city (ie 98% of the population).

There are a million similar fantasies people experience on a daily basis that the games industry is yet to exploit. If it really wants to appeal to the population as a whole, I'd suggest some of the following:

Magic Agreement Party This is simply a game in which you sit at a dinner party table espousing your viewpoints on any subject under the sun, while everyone else slowly comes to agree with everything you're saying. Actually, this gives me an idea for an even better game, which is ...

Super Squabble Champ IV This game consists of nothing but petty relationship squabbles in which your character is endowed with the mystical ability to zip back in time and record footage of your partner being a massive bloody hypocrite, then zoom back into the present to play it all back on a giant screen in front of their eyes until they quiver and break down and confess that you were 100% right all along. Then you get a million points and it plays a little song.

Boundless Libertine Plus Sims-style title in which you build a character that looks exactly like you, living in a house that looks exactly like your own, with a job exactly like yours - basically every detail is as close to your life as possible, except one: there are absolutely no consequences for your actions. So you can walk into the office and have sex with nine co-workers, then go home and eat doughnuts for 200 days without putting on any weight. You can even stamp up and down on your dog's head if you like, and it won't so much as bruise. The day this game comes out is the day the phenomenon of workplace massacres ceases for ever.

Peter Sissons' Tetris I've included this for my own amusement. It's basically just Tetris, but as played through the eyes and mind of Peter Sissons as he sits in his dressing room at BBC News 24 waiting to go on-air. It's precisely the same as usual, except occasionally you hear him clearing his throat, or someone saying "need you in the studio in 10, Peter" through an earpiece. And when you clear 100 lines, the viewpoint changes and he stands up in front of the mirror, drops his pants and shows you his bum.

You get the picture. The list could go on. Enough space operas and chain mail. We want more down-to-earth fantasies, and we want them now.

This week like every other comics geek in the nation Charlie saw Watchmen: "Fun as a massive great spectacle, but it surely can't make any sense whatsoever to anyone who hasn't read the comic; it was a bit like watching an impressive animated version of a collection of snatched memories of what the comic was like, if you see what I mean."