Fighting Fit

Besides simple attrition, though, there's another reason why the crusade against videogames is falling apart - and if you walk into any games or electronics store in the UK this week, you'll see it in action.

GTA IV isn't the only game that's selling like hot cakes in Europe at the moment; Nintendo's Wii Fit is also selling out as fast as the company can ship the Balance Board to retail. While there's arguably a market for it among the same customers who buy GTA (my own advancing paunch is a testament to the power of great games to do awful things to your waistline), the crossover between consumers of the two products is probably fairly minimal.

This is the real mass-market in action - the kind of mainstream, mass-market appeal that I've been banging on about in these columns for years. GTA IV on its own is not a mass-market product - it's hugely successful within a large niche. Wii Fit, equally, is not mass-market per se - it, too, is successful within a large niche. Combine the two, though, and you can see the extraordinary, mass-market reach of gaming itself.

This is the Holy Grail - the ability to launch two wildly disparate products in the same week, and garner a huge audience for both. It's like when Hollywood launches a sci-fi action-fest and a warm-hearted romantic comedy in the same week, and you get to see boys in their late teens desperately trying to act like the person ahead of them in the ticket queue isn't their mum. As painful as it may be for some gamers, GameStop, GAME and their ilk are well on their way to having your mums as customers.

Why does this kill the anti-videogames message? Simply because for the media, which is used to painting videogames with broad, tar-laden brushstrokes, it's difficult to now backtrack and have a story on page one about evil videogames corrupting our youth, and a story on page four about fantastic videogames helping you get back in shape, or warding off senile dementia.

Moreover, the blow is being struck that will turn Middle England, Middle America, and Middle Everywhere Else (although perhaps not Middle Earth) into gamers. I had previously believed that this process was inevitable, but only because the generations who grew up with games are getting older, and given enough time there would be little remaining of the generations to whom games are new and suspicious. As it transpires, my beliefs were pessimistic - from web games to the Wii, via SingStar, The Sims, Rock Band and plenty more besides, the games industry is actually converting its former detractors, rather than just waiting for them to die off.

In a week which has seen new records set, with high review scores thrown around like pies at a food fight, the sight of games flying off the shelves at two very disparate ends of the industry's product spectrum is a hugely heartening one. It should put a grin on the face of everyone with a financial interest in the games business - but for everyone who cares about the art and progress of videogames, there's reason for an even wider smile in the fact that the industry's critics are on the back foot, being dragged ever-faster into obscurity and irrelevance by a tide of inevitability.