But, while I hate to be a Negative Nancy, I think that excitement needs to be cooled down with a few caveats.

The most obvious one is that multi-display systems are nothing new. Back at the Spider launch in 2007, ATI demonstrated an eight-monitor gaming setup which made everyone go “ooh” — and which was then never heard of again. Admittedly, that system required four graphics cards, but the enthusiast gaming market isn’t known for penny-pinching. If people genuinely wanted to play games on six monitors, they’d be doing so already.

And ATI clearly realises this, as the six-monitor capability is to be reserved for specialist models (of which, we may safely assume, not many will be made). Mainstream cards will be limited to three displays.

The rule of three

But then three is an awkward number. You can’t make three screens into a grid, obviously. If you line them up in a row you get a screen that’s five times as wide as it is high, which is frankly weird. Stack them vertically (with a special stand) and it’s like using a widescreen monitor on its side. Your best bet is probably to rotate three monitors into portrait mode and push them together, for a viewport that’s similar in shape to a normal desktop monitor but with three times the pixels.

Even then, though, your huge multi-monitor display will have two big, dark bezels cutting right across the picture.

That’s not just a superficial complaint. Yes, the overall graphical effect is cheapened by the intrusion of thick plastic bars across the playfield. But bezels also introduce very particular problems when game elements stray across them. A perfect illustration was provided by the flight simulator that ATI used to demonstrate its six-monitor setup, in which the speedometer and altimeter, in the middle of the display, ended up split across two screens, leaving them basically illegible:

(Let’s not get into the problems you’d hit if you tried to use an Eyefinity monitor group to run a productivity application like Word or Excel.)

Lethal bezel

Bezels can cause more general gameplay problems too, as objects moving at regular speeds suddenly leap forward by an inch or more as they pass from screen to screen. That certainly doesn’t help the player to track opponents with the precision required to target / overtake / frag them.

A workaround in some cases could be for the software to insert virtual gaps between screens corresponding to the bezel width, to produce an effect like looking through a window frame. This would bring its own problems, though: it would make it fully impossible to read the flight simulator instruments, for example, and would open up the possibility of bullets and enemies hiding in the “dark” area between screens.

Basically, there’s no proper solution with current hardware —— and I suspect that means that multi-monitor gaming isn’t going to catch on with real people any time soon. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the Eyefinity demos as much as anyone, and the idea of a huge display certainly does appeal. But, sad to say, I think it’s going to take a slightly more creative development than this to make it a reality.

Rahul Sood is an influential man: he’s the founder of boutique system-builder VoodooPC and now head of HP’s Global Gaming business. So when he posts a couple of blogs about how the gaming PC as we know it is history – an initial rant and then a follow-up answering the deluge of comments and clarifying some of his original points – you know that he means business.

While the title suggests a controversial ‘PC gaming is doomed’ scenario, though, his blog makes a lot of sense. The last few months have seen plenty of economic turmoil and a huge shift in the graphics market. While the credit crunch has been hitting hard, high-end graphics just don’t seem to matter any more – as the post explains, it’s almost impossible to justify spending £400 on a new GPU unless you’re one of the tiny minority playing at an enormous resolution. Sood suggests that the days of people regularly spending thousands of new computers and hundreds on new high-end graphics cards are over. For the first time in recent memory it’s conceivable that he could be right, too.

Previously, you’d have to shell out hundreds if you wanted to play the latest games at their prettiest settings. That’s just not the case any more – £150 on an ATI Radeon HD 4870 will have you playing almost anything. I’ve got one in my machine at home and it handles Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 at 1,680 x 1,050 with no problems. It can’t quite manage Crysis at its peak settings, but that’s about the only thing this remarkable GPU can’t handle. And those lush jungles look great on mere ‘high’ settings, anyway.

This is symptomatic of the way gaming is going – and our A List is packed full of more evidence that you just don’t need a £2,000 machine these days. The Chillblast Fusion Sidewinder costs £835 exc. VAT and comes with an HD 4870 and overclocked processor – and managed a 40fps in our high-detail Crysis benchmark. The slightly cheaper Cyberpower Gamer Infinity GT has an HD 4850 and ran the same benchmark at a playable 33fps, with the PC Specialist Apollo Q8200 GTX+, featuring an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+, ran at 34fps. Three machines that cost well under £1,000, three systems that all include monitors that can fully take advantage of the performance of these so-called ‘mid-range’ cards.

That’s not to say that expensive machines aren’t fun and don’t have their place. My time spent in the PC Pro Labs testing, benchmarking and prodding the six machines we welcomed for the Ultimate PC Labs was hugely enjoyable, and proved that your extra cash does go towards some things that you just don’t get on mid-priced machines. The build-quality was largely impeccable, Blu-ray drives and SSD was the norm, and the complex water-cooling meant that chips ran cool despite their high clock speeds.

There’s no doubt in our minds that these monster machines – with their equally lofty prices – have a place in the future of high-performance computing. They’ll always be enthusiasts willing to shell out top dollar on outlandish and enormously powerful machines. Sood believes, though, that this market will quickly diminish.

For the majority, the ballpark is shifting. Our A List proves that huge power is available from modest machines and that a company can’t just survive on making Ultimate PCs alone – systems like that just aren’t vital to play the latest games, and the era of mainstream hardware offering polygon-destroying power seems to be well and truly upon us.

This manifesto of change brings us neatly on to the next product to emerge from VoodooPC: the innovative and slightly strange Firebird 803, which brazenly ditches many of the conventions that we hold dear in our computers – whether it’s a £500 email machine or £3,000 monster.

The design of the machine is reminiscent of a smaller Blackbird 002. Whereas that machine was bulky and somewhat bloated, the glossy exterior and cool colours suggest that this is a far more focussed system, albeit one that appears to be around half the size – at the very least – of its predecessor.

Inside, though, is where the real excitement is. The specifications are tantalising: an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, two 320GB, hot-swappable hard disks, Blu-ray and draft-n wireless. There are three GPUs – but it’s not in the heat-spewing triple-SLI arrangement that has proved so problematic in the past. Two of the graphics chips are Nvidia GeForce 9800S, low form-factor chips, whereas the third is a weaker part. The computer can switch between them when you’re gaming and when you’re not to save power.

ATX has also been abandoned for this machine – instead, the motherboard is a proprietary part that has the two main GPUs sitting flush to the surface, with water-cooling blocks atop them to keep them chilled, as well as another cooling loop on the processor. There appear to be no space for PCI Express slots of any kind – just the DIMM slots that already hold the RAM.

Of course, this system does come with inevitable caveats. Hardly any expansion potential, for instance, and the fact that this new form factor has been adopted in precisely one machine – there’s a huge amount of potential if this could become an accepted standard, but even more risk should this gamble fail. However, we’re still incredibly excited: HP claim that the Firebird 803 is incredibly quiet and uses hardly any power when compared to bulky desktop machines.

In a way, the Firebird 803 is almost akin to a console: a self-contained machine rather than the traditionally open, ATX-based machine. Whether the two graphics chips also follow the lead of consoles and can’t quite match PC performance is something that we’re eager to find out. HP is keeping mum on whether the Firebird 803 will see the light of day over here – and we’re curious as to whether this new approach will both find favour with keen PC gamers and be able to match up to the sort of performance we’re used to.

We’ll keep bugging HP to send us a Firebird 803 so we can see if it really delivers on all of its lofty promises – and to see if Rahul Sood’s prediction about the demise of the traditional high-end machine is upon us. Until then, let me know what you think: is this the end of the super-expensive gaming PC, or is HP trying to force a change that just isn’t necessary? And are you still willing to spend silly money on the latest hardware – no matter what the price?

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

Stuart Turton recently wrote that computers no longer have a soul, but I disagree. After installing the motherboard as well as everything else, I had to rip it all apart again and re-seat the CPU heatsink the correct way round; I was convinced that my PC had a soul, and also convinced that it was demonic and needed to be thrown through the nearest window, alongside the rest of the components.

When it was built – and I’d made sure that every header and connector on the motherboard was plugged into the right sockets – I sat back and prodded the power button. Against all odds, the little access light flickered and the fans chugged into life. It was true – I’d built my own computer. We put together many rigs in the PC Pro Labs, but those are different – they normally sit on specially-designed test beds and lack many of the mod-cons that feature in the average home PC.

This was different. My very own PC, assembled from the ground up. Sure, neither the hard disk or the optical drive were actually secured into the chassis – instead, they had been crammed into the respective bays and left to lean on struts of metal – but it didn’t matter. Neither did it matter when I realised that my fan, which was purchased because it had automatic control, needed to run at full pelt to keep the CPU cooled. I simply turned up the speakers and zoned it out, marvelling at the stunning graphics that the new rig enabled me to see.

Hopefully, the point of this long and rambling rant is that computers – and gaming on computers – really shouldn’t be discounted. People claim that playing PC games is far more expensive than playing them on consoles – but I’m not so sure. A reasonable processor, graphics card and couple of gigabytes of RAM can be had for under £200 and will still let you play modern titles at decent levels of quality – and take any of your slightly older games and play them at the highest levels of graphical excellence, as they were originally intended. Up your budget to £300 – which is how much the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost until recently, don’t forget – and your upgrade will have you playing at with many of the settings ramped up to the max, even in the newest games.

There’s a huge amount of satisfaction when it comes to upgrading or building a machine. I recently spent a morning in the office ripping apart an old Shuttle machine and rebuilding it for some Blu-ray testing – and, remarkably, it was pretty enjoyable. Granted, it wasn’t as fun when I realised that I’d got the wrong RAM and had to trek downstairs to get some more, but to see it burst into life at the end of the re-build made me feel like a proud father.

Building or upgrading a PC immediately guarantees that you’ll have more of an emotional connection to a machine than you would with a console. I have a PS3 and the set-up process consisted of no more than getting it out of the box, plugging it, and registering a new account. It’s a remarkable thing and has delivered many hours of gaming pleasure – but, as Stuart pointed out in regards to his current PC, it’s a mere machine. The same could be said of my PS2 and PSX; the only consoles that differ are my old Megadrive and Atari, and those are probably tainted with the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia more than anything else.

My computer is something different entirely. Turton may argue that now, with machines no more than incremental upgrades over the last expensive, must-have part, they offer little in the way of personality to compare to the past. Not true. I know the various grunts and groans from my hard disk, recognise the exact moment to turn my fan down if I want any silence at all, and can predict when I’ll come a cropper because I’ve been a bit greedy and turned a few settings up too high.

Also consider that new console games cost £40, whereas the latest PC releases are almost never this expensive. Grand Theft Auto 4 costs less than £25 including VAT on Amazon for PC – fifteen pounds cheaper than it did when released on PS3 and Xbox 360 earlier in the year. You’ll soon recoup your potentially higher investment as you work your way through the year’s top releases.

There’s also the overriding factor when it comes to PC gaming: some games are just better played on a desktop. David Bayon will argue against this, but first-person shooter games demand a mouse and keyboard. RTS titles are the same. Whack a decent graphics card in your PC, and almost all PC games will look better than their console equivalents, too. Invest in a gamepad or steering wheel and you’ve got a machine that will put any console in its place.

Consoles do have their charms: I love playing FIFA 09 on my PS3, and I’ll concede that plenty of games – such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band – are better played in front of the TV. There’s something different about PC gaming, though – from the whirring, juddering machine in the corner crafted by my own hands to the better graphics and sheer depth of software available – that means it’s my favourite format. And I don’t care how many people slag it off.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/12/10/in-defence-of-patching-crashing-and-tinkering/feed/ 17 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/21/first-look-nvidias-integrated-graphics/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/10/21/first-look-nvidias-integrated-graphics/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:08:16 +0000 David Bayon http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=3801 Intel beware: Nvidia has its scope trained squarely on your dominance in the notebook graphics market. With an estimated 140 million laptops in the wild in 2008, more than two-thirds of which feature nothing more powerful than basic integrated graphics chips, it’s a huge segment that Nvidia has until now had no access to.

The 9400M is the key that Nvidia hopes will allow it to eat away at Intel’s share. Combining the north bridge, south bridge and GPU into one chip less than half the size of Intel’s GMA X4500HD, it could be the great leap forward we’ve been waiting so long for. The integrated graphics solution that can actually run the latest games – we’d almost given up hope.

With 16 parallel processing cores, the chip is at least 70% GPU, with the rest of the essentials crammed around the edges where there’s room (as the die image clearly shows).

It offers full support for DirectX 10, PhysX, CUDA and even contains dedicated hardware for high definition video processing – Nvidia claims full-spec Blu-ray capability on a single battery charge, including all the PiP and BD Live features.

Gaming power

To demonstrate its power, Nvidia’s notebook general manager Rene Haas gave us a little side-by-side demonstration – pitting the brand new GeForce 9400M-equipped Macbook against a Centrino 2 Sony Vaio FW. Running Call of Duty 4 on both, at 1,024 x 768 and medium settings, the results were eye-opening.

The Sony exhibited all the stuttering motion and painful hangs we’ve grown accustomed to in low-end laptops, barely gettting close to 10fps throughout the level. By contrast, the MacBook ran happily at what we’d estimate to be around 25fps throughout, barely even hiccuping when the action hotted up and the effects began flying. Sure, it’s not Crysis at Very High settings, but it is a laptop with integrated graphics running a cutting-edge game at a playable framerate – and that’s something no manufacturer has yet offered us.

Photoshop

As exciting as this is, it’s in non-gaming applications that more useful advances may be appreciated. Haas fired up Photoshop CS4 on both demo laptops and opened up a whopping 3GB image ready for manipulation. As anyone who runs Photoshop on a laptop will expect, rotating and zooming the image on the Intel-equipped Sony was patchy at best: zooming was achieved in paused steps, while a 90-degree rotation left us with a progress bar for more than a minute before we saw any change.

The 9400M-equipped MacBook, on the other hand, simply flew through the image. Rotation was handled on the fly, while zooming exhibited the same smoothness we loved in Microsoft’s Deep Zoom technology when it was first demoed.

(Click thumbnail to play video)

In short, laptops with integrated GPUs can now benefit from the same CUDA-enabled technological advances as those with power-hungry discrete cards taking up the slack.

Nvidia claims the 9400M will offer five times the performance in the same power envelope as its Intel integrated rival – a bold claim indeed, but one backed up by the demos we’ve seen. We’ll be running it through our own intensive performance and battery tests in the coming weeks as laptop manufacturers unveil their first offerings with the integrated GPU.

Future potential

I spoke to Haas after the demo and asked if he thought the success of this chipset would be detrimental to Nvidia’s discrete laptop chips, but he was unequivocal. “Are we cannibalising ourselves by releasing this? I don’t think we are. Larger laptops will always have the need for discrete graphics, and there are still plenty of people who’ll prefer the power of a discrete chip in smaller laptops.”

He also threw up a few very interesting prospects on the horizon for the Geforce 9400M. CUDA-based upscaling of DVDs to 720p or more is on the agenda, potentially doing away with the need for expensive HD drives. And your low-end integrated GPU could also soon be enhancing YouTube videos – pixel interpolation of grainy streamed video is a highly parallel-processor-intensive task which lends itself well to CUDA, and Haas was hopeful it could even be with us before the end of 2008.

Whether we get there this year or next, it’s clear that Nvidia’s newest baby has the potential to shake up the integrated graphics market in a huge way. Intel has had it pretty easy for years now, despite every new advance coming with claims of genuine 3D power, and every one failing to live up to that promise. Nvidia may be struggling in the graphics card market right now, but by finally proving that an integrated chip can handle gaming it’s just diverted a whole new revenue stream towards its own coffers. Intel needs to pull its socks up.

The Blackbird began life as the brainchild of an HP engineer by the name of Tom Szolyga. A games enthusiast stifled in the more sedate entertainment division after the comparative failure of a range of Compaq gaming machines, he began work on the Blackbird, keeping it in a box under his desk – in much the same way that Google engineers can work on their own products 20% of the time.

Szolyga continued working on the project in private until he took a flight with a couple of HP directors. One of them was late so, in the ensuing small talk, Szolyga enthused about his project – and he’d received funding by the time the plane landed. Development moved ahead when Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC, was brought in to lend his expertise to the project after HP bought his boutique manufacturer. The result was shown off in London today and, well, it’s mighty impressive.

The striking chassis, for instance, isn’t just for show. The fins all over the machine work as a giant heatsink, and the stand at the bottom doesn’t just look good, but allows for air to get at the bottom of the case, too. Two optical drives are included – DVD and Blu-ray – and mounted vertically behind a pair of doors in the slatted front, and the usual ports and sockets on the front of the PC are hidden. Push down on the top of the machine, and a neat pop-up caddy has a card reader, pair of USB ports, FireWire and headphone and microphone jacks. There’s no eSATA, though, which we have seen on cheaper machines.

Inside, the VoodooPC heritage is obvious. PSU, GPUs and CPU are kept apart with divided compartments making sure that hot air from one component won’t interfere with another, and each door or barrier snaps out easily – so getting at each part is simple. The only tool required is a small Allen key, and that’s attached to the side of the optical drive compartment.

The modular PSU sits at the bottom of the chassis, with a couple of huge fans – and the water-cooling system – at the top; cables wind their way down to the CPU and pair of graphics cards to keep them chilled.

Five hard disk bays sit towards the front of the case, and it’s incredibly simple to add a new disk: drop it into the plastic caddy and plug it back in. The SATA and power cables are mounted at the end of the bay, so it’s as easy as literally plugging the drive in. They’re hot-swappable, too, depending on how the drives are configured.

The sample we saw came with different hardware to what’ll be in the finished version – it had a pair of 8800-series graphics cards, for a start – but the official retail spec still sounds relatively tempting: an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor, a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk with a 10,000rpm 160GB for super-quick access. We’d question the choice of graphics cards when 4870 X2 and GTX 280 cards are all the rage, but they’ll still be lightning quick.

You’ll be paying for the fantastic specification and superb design, though. The Blackbird 002 will cost £2,722 excluding VAT – and without a monitor or set of speakers. It’s a fantastic machine with a fascinating backstory, but is that enough to win us over when it costs that much? We’ve been assured by HP that we can have one for review pretty soon, so we’ll deliver our verdict as soon as we get our hands on one.

That final option was my immediate answer, and probably yours too, so the results of a recent survey by online gaming community GameStrata may shock you. Brace yourselves.

The average gamer will spend more than US$30,500 between the ages of 18 and 48. Yes, thirty thousand dollars. That’s more than £15,000. On video games.

Now that figure covers both games and gaming hardware, and the survey does only encompass a community of dedicated online gamers, but it’s still astonishing when lumped together like that. I could have bought a new car, put a deposit down on a house, or enoyed the holiday of a lifetime. Instead I took Bromley to League One mid-table mediocrity and shot a few pigeons in Liberty City. Depressing, isn’t it.

But it’s easy to see how easily that figure is reached. Over a 30-year period that equates to £500 a year – that may seem a lot, but last year I spent £400 on a console alone, and games now usually come with price tags of £40 each.

But more interesting is the contribution of digital downloads of games and game items in that figure: a massive 85% of respondents to the survey had purchased digital goods in the last month. I’ll hazard a guess I’m not alone in seeing them as cheap little impulse buys that barely register on my monthly bank statement, yet with each costing anything from a few quid to a tenner or more, it’s easy to rack them up without feeling like your overspending.

It’s not clear whether the survey includes PC hardware in that figure (a couple of grand on a PC every few years in the ’90s would have most people nearing the total well before time), but social communities like the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live are apparently making us more comfortable splashing out online.

“With forecasters estimating this year’s sales will reach nearly $23 billion, it’s clear that gaming is the fastest-growing sector in the entertainment industry,” said Barry Dorf, COO of GameStrata. “The best part is that the trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing. In spite of predictions of a sluggish economy, gamers continue to invest their time and money into electronic entertainment.”

As I stand at the counter in Game with my credit card out, I can’t help feeling he’s laughing at me.

However, Acer appeared to have wandered into the gaming PC market and taken first prize in the competition for making a gaudy, over-the-top garish machine with this, their new Predator desktop. This orange creation may pack in some decent specs – the top configuration includes a QX9650 CPU and two 9800 GX2 graphics cards in SLI configuration. It’s a little bit ludicrous and, for all of its vaguely embarrasing styling, part of me wants one very badly indeed.

Even the names ooze machismo like a Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and Norris wrestling match. The cheapest model is dubbed the Sniper, and the rest of the names follow suit. There’s the Trooper, and then the Crusher. The best Predator is called, elegently, the Eliminator. It’s like watching an episode of Robot Wars without Craig Charles.

The specifications are just as enthusiastic, seemingly based around willy-waving and endless ego-stroking. The base model packs in a Q9300 quad-core processor, two 9600GT graphics cards, and over 1TB of storage. That’s before you notice the water cooling, 4GB of RAM (with 64-bit Vista) and Blu-ray drive. That’s the cheapest model, too. The Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut, at the top of our performance PC tree, is surely quaking in its boots.

The rest of the range ups the ante with every silly name: incrementally faster processors coupled with more graphical power, right up to the 4-GPU arrangement of the Eliminator.
And that’s before I even mention one of the most outlandish cases that we’ve ever laid eyes on. Where some cases may come with a door, the Predator has some sort of face-plate, held in place by four heavy-duty hinges. Open it up and the optical drive and card reader are hidden in between acres of slatted black metal that contrasts with the shiny orange exterior, all angles, lines and intimidation. It does, genuinely, look like some sort of transformer.

Acer claim that the gaudy case does actually come with benefits that will please gamers. Light effects are customisable, and the bottom half of the case opens to reveal easily-accessible hard disk bays, which will surely prove useful.

Undoubtedly, performance will be mind-boggling thanks to the expensive combination of gaming components, water cooling and sheer power. But just look at it. I’m in two minds as to whether I’d want to sit this in my bedroom or take it to a monster truck rally. A part of me wants one, and another part of me feels angry that this is, allegedly, what gamers want. In short, I’m torn between its gaming brilliance and garish looks.

Oh, and did we mention the prices? The Eliminator comes in at a SRRP of 4,000 euros. Which has slightly put me off. Performance will be fantastic but, specification aside, would you pay a premium to have a PC that looks like this?

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.

The really interesting thing being that his research involved actually reading and analysing all the previous research that had been done on the subject of video games and links to violence, the very same studies that ‘experts’ are quick to call upon and which journalists quote from when screaming for the likes of Grand Theft Auto to be banned. Kierkegaard admits that the GTA effect, where graphical realism is really quite intense, is becoming more important and most gamers look forward to each release precisely because of the violence, the crime and yes even the sexual or drugs related plots. However, there remains a huge difference between visiting a virtual prostitute and a real life one, for a start your crotch is likely to remain much less itchy and no actual women will have been exploited in the process (sits back and awaits angry comments from the bra burning brigade and the manbag men arguing that somehow a pretend prostitute does exactly that) and there remains a huge difference between committing a virtual crime and a real one.

Kierkegaard analysed a wide range of research papers, many of which concluded (at least since the early 1980’s when graphical video games started to get real) that playing violent games can lead to violent behaviour such as fighting at school or even robbery and assault out on the streets. Some studies have even linked aggression related areas of the brain with being stimulated during game play. He argues that violent crime among the young has actually decreased since the early 1990’s while video games have steadily increased. Using US based official crime reporting statistics he argues “with millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence – instead, violence has declined.”

Perhaps the main point that we should take away from all of this is that while, as Kierkegaard admits, it is quite possible that some video games can have an affect on emotional response, behaviour and attitudes, there is no hard evidence to suggest that they do so to any greater degree than books, television or listening to Radio 2. The truth is that if someone is already predisposed to violent behaviour then any input which triggers an emotional response can trigger that violent behaviour. Should we therefore ban all books, magazines, television and radio in case a couple of nutters might decide to go kill someone because Terry Wogan told them to in a cryptic message?