I’ve just spent the greater part of this week writing a flash games roundup for the web, which you can find here. Not only is doing stuff like this and getting paid for it an utterly brilliant part of my job, but it also got me thinking.

And the first thing it made me thunk was this: everybody, no matter what they say, is a gamer.

Games, when done well, are entertainment. Everybody likes being entertained, therefore everybody likes games. This was brought home to me on Wednesday, when PC Pro effectively ground to a halt as everybody – from production through editorial, and even our sister site IT Pro – became obsessed with The Helicopter Game. More musings on this can be found in the flash game roundup, but in a nutshell you fly a little helicopter as far as you can without crashing. That’s it. It’s brilliant, it’s entertaining, and more importantly, it’s accessible. You don’t have to make any time commitment up front to play it, as with GTA – you can decide how much time you want to commit once you’ve started playing it.

The second thing that occurred was that flash games are fearless things. This is not an indictment of modern gaming, which continues to throw up innovative titles – but with so much money now involved it’s inevitable that some of the more “way-out” concepts, once so prevalent in commercial gaming, will fall by the wayside with publishers terrified of alienating the casual buyer. Flash game developers hold no such fear, and the result is fascinating experimentation – check out Chronotron in the round up for an example.

The third thing, and last, I promise, is that flash gaming is home to a bastion of talent. Developers, artwork, physics, ideas, puzzles. These are not shoddy jobs knocked out in five minutes. In many cases years of effort have been invested with no other reason than that the folks making these games truly love gaming. It’s heartening to see and yet another reason to love the internet.

As a gamer who’s become slightly jaded with gaming in recent years, this roundup has renewed my faith – the future of gaming is in good hands.