BOB GARFIELD: The video game industry generated 28 billion dollars in sales last year -- a single title, Madden's NFL Football -- has raked in a billion dollars alone over the past 14 years. Yet, according to writer Jonathan Dee, gaming is flying below the radar of the cultural consciousness, even as it races to overtake the movie business as a source of mass entertainment. Dee's piece titled Playing Mogul appeared in this Sunday's New York Times magazine, and he joins me now. Jonathan, welcome to OTM.

JONATHAN DEE: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Why is this so off the radar of the culture vultures who follow all trends, large and small? Is it just because we're all older than 28, the average age of video gamers?

JONATHAN DEE: I think that's part of it. There's a real divide there, and the divide is being erased. I think the people in the video game business would be the first to tell you that. I think 17 percent of players are over the age of 50. Many more of them are women than you'd think. But I think it all happened so fast, people who think they know what games are don't know any more. Ever since the first Sony Play Station was introduced in about 1995, they developed at such an incredible clip that anybody who was in the demographic at that point takes them for granted as a part of the cultural universe at least as much as movies or videotapes or DVDs or even music. Anyone older than that just thinks of it as a kind of niche phenomenon that belongs exclusively to young people.

BOB GARFIELD: Well give us a brief tour, if you would, of the business as it stands now.

JONATHAN DEE:The industry themselves talks about different varieties of games -- fighters and shooters --any kind of war game would be classified as a shooter. Sports games, which really are not meant to simulate the experience of playing a sport but to simulate the experience of sports of TV. Driving games. Kareoke games, interestingly, are very popular. The ones that interested me the most, at least in theory, were what I refer to as God games, which are not about standing with or near or impersonating a character, but about controlling an environment.

BOB GARFIELD: There's an incredible story about one of the God games in your piece. The universe in question is an amusement park.

JONATHAN DEE:Yes. Yeah. The game is called Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's actually a whole franchise. It's very popular for Atari, and one of the vice presidents of Atari told me a story about his own teenage daughter playing the game. The interesting thing about the game is that it's not just about designing the park, but at a certain point, when you feel that it's ready to go, you open it, and when you open it, little digital people start to show up at the gate and pay admission and ride the rides. And if, if the prices are too high, they stay away. If, if the rides are too boring, they go to other rides. And so you're constantly tinkering in order to satisfy the little imaginary customer. It's possible to zoom in, as you're playing the game, on any one of these little tiny customers, and this man's daughter zoomed in on this one little figure who had a little frown on is face, and she became sort of obsessed with this guy, trying to make him happy. Built new rides, opened up new concession stands, gave things away for free, and kept constantly checking in with this one patron -- and he just still kept frowning. So, finally, she clicked on him, picked him up and dragged him over and dropped him in the river-- [LAUGHTER] and said to her father "Daddy, I, I tried everything, but I just couldn't make him happy."

BOB GARFIELD:Well when video gaming does bubble to the surface, it's usually when there's some criticism afoot for gratuitous violence or something. Grand Theft Auto, that series, which is just filled with mayhem, was the target of a lot of critics. You say it's not about the mayhem. You say that's not where the appeal is; that's it's, it's about the story.

JONATHAN DEE: Well, the technology of the games themselves. It's still about aiming at things and, and hitting them. And so the games do tend to be disproportionately about violence. That's undeniable. But this is one of the things that came as the biggest surprise to me -- is that they're not games in the sense that you don't play them to win. They tell a story, and the object of the game, so to speak, is to get that story to complete itself. Sometimes you have to do that through violence. There's a very violent and also an adolescent sensibility in something like Grand Theft Auto, but as even people inside the industry will admit, it's also just on its own artistic merits if you will, it's a great game.

BOB GARFIELD:I want to talk about the idea that somehow this will overtake Hollywood as the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. History suggests that there's something to be said for letting somebody else do the expressing; that that's what art is all about. Will millions of people really opt for self-expression, maybe sort of mundane self-expression against the opportunity to have the genius of real artists, or at least professional moviemakers?

JONATHAN DEE: That's a good question. Personally, until I started writing this story, I had no patience at all with the idea of interactive art, interactive novels, hypertexts, things like that. Just left me cold -- for that exact reason. I, I don't engage with a work of art in order to find out what I already feel. It's easy to understand if you think about certain types of popular entertainment --action-adventure movies. Atari's big title in the last couple of years was the video game version of The Matrix. Now, in that case -- I don't know, synergy isn't even the word for it. The brothers who wrote and directed the movies themselves also wrote and essentially directed the game. It was released at the same time. There were scenes shot for the game with the real actors that didn't appear in the movie. When I look at that, and I look at the movies, I can see a future in which when the technology gets a little better, I, I would be hard-pressed to think of a reason why anyone would pay to go see, for instance, a new James Bond movie as opposed to playing the new James Bond game, because the option to sit back and watch the story and do nothing exists, but the option exists on top of that of entering the story and directing the characters where to go.

BOB GARFIELD:Your piece concerns itself substantially with the future of gaming and the presumption that broad band and more and more technology will make it ever more provocative and ever more irresistible. But at the same time there has been this resurgence of the classic video games. All of a sudden Pac Man and Space Invaders are huge. And in this week's Slate, Clive Thompson argues that the retro games are doing so well because they actually focus on the gaming aspect of things and not on the narrative. If the movie crossover idea gets pushed too far, isn't there a chance that they'll become less, not more, attractive to game players?

JONATHAN DEE: That, that nostalgia wave is interesting, but I can't see people going back to that in any serious way, having seen the depth of the virtual environments that games offer now. I did see in one of the gaming magazines -- they took a lot of these games -- the old Mattel football game for instance that you kind of held and played with your thumbs, and the players were represented by little red blips, and gave them to a bunch of 12 year old kids -- there was a brief burst of laughter, and then they threw the game away. [LAUGHTER] I mean they just -- they, they couldn't, they, they couldn't imagine that anyone was ever interested in anything like that.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Jonathan, thank you very much.

JONATHAN DEE: My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD:Jonathan Dee's article Playing Mogul appears in this weekend's New York Times magazine. In that story he also notes that massively multiplayer on line role playing games, or MMORPG, is the, quote, "Holy Grail of Gaming." It's the target at which the arrow of technology is squarely aimed. Competition on line, against friends or strangers in remote locations.