Multiplayer has also changed the fundamental concept of a 'game'. Older, single-player-only games were more like conventional products - name designers or publishers producing titles the way filmmakers or movie studios do. But the multiplayer reality has brought the industry into unknown territory. True, a perpetual stream of 'titles' can be expected from established publishers, but the communities created by multiplayer have given rise to an unexpected wellspring of innovation.

The phenomenon of Counterstrike is a significant milestone. Currently the most popular multiplayer online game in the world (responsible for hundreds of millions of Internet hours; there are likely 15,000 people playing as you read this), Counterstrike (www.counter-strike.net) is actually a 'mod' (modified version) of an existing game called Half-Life. Counterstrike was created by gamers in their spare time and was made available as a free download on the Internet, usable by those who owned Half-Life. This was possible because Valve released Half-Life with open-source code, thus creating one of the earliest and most active computer game 'modding scenes'.

The release of development kits for new PC games is now standard fare, allowing fans to take a title and run with it. Some modding, involves remaking a 'parent game' into an almost wholly new vision, but most is a simple value-adding process: the creation of new elements - new maps, new models - that enhance a favourite game, making it ever-changing, ever-developing, ever-growing. If a parent game proves popular, mods will appear all over the web - most, interestingly, created by high-school kids in their spare time - and some of these are pretty good. This harkens back to the modding of role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons - which itself became a standard. Counterstrike has changed the concept of the game as a product. It is more than a product: it is a standard, a game, a set of development tools, and a vision for future games.

This 'open-system' nature of the PC game market contrasts with the 'closed-system' reality of the consoles. Yet the console market remains financially strong, owing to the greater proprietary control Sega, Sony and Nintendo (and soon Microsoft) retain over their game systems. It is difficult to mod a console game, but it is also difficult to pirate one. The development of console titles represents direct income for console manufacturers. The same obviously cannot be said for PC games.

Yet the console manufacturers cannot entirely dismiss the power of the open-system model to attract attention and amateur development for a game system ('amateur' here having its classic connotation: done for the love of it, rather than money). If a Counterstrike can - completely out of the blue - become a new benchmark for the entire game industry, can the console manufacturers afford to ignore the innovative potential inherent in open-system gaming communities?

Development costs for any given title are rising quickly.It can take a full development team two years and one to four million dollars to produce a class A-game title. This increases investor, publishers and developer risk in taking chances on new visions, in the process possibly alienating the brilliant new game 'artist' from the support they need.

Perhaps this is why Microsoft recently announced two new programs to foster this kind of creativity for its upcoming console: the Xbox Independent Developer Program and the Xbox Incubator Program ( www.xbox.com/xbox/flash/story.asp?story=S11.htm ). These programs make support and free PC-based development tools available to create an open-system-style game development community for the closed-system of the Xbox - helping very small developers advance their new ideas to the point they can approach established publishers.

Another major trend in this industry is the slow movement of gaming toward mainstream cultural acceptance. The most obvious indicator of this is the rising age of the average gamer - no longer just in their teens. Players are not putting away their console and computer games after their teens, and many are now in their late-twenties, thirties, even forties. Other symptoms of mainstream acceptance abound. Game titles are becoming properties for film projects (Dungeons & Dragons, for instance - which has migrated from pen-and-paper to computer - will be released on the silver screen this December). Players of Quake, Starcraft, Counterstrike, and a growing list of other titles, can earn thousands of dollars in prize money playing at a professional level (www.thecpl.com; www.battletop.com).

Academic experts in artificial intelligence (AI) are impressed with the advances the game developers have made in AI, and are now working closely with them. BAFTA (the 'British Academy Awards') now gives their prestigious award to PC and console game titles, treating them as works of art (http://www.bafta.org/bafta/5_ie/5_INTRO.htm; http://www.interactive.org/iaa/index.html).

Whether or not they are art, it is clear that games are having a massive effect on both the computer industry and mainstream pop culture.

By Tim Carter (Gamesmyther)TimC@theNRGGroup.com