If there was a time when the market for video games in this country truly came of age, it was the run-up to last Christmas. Spurred on by the launch of three new home consoles in the space of 12 months, sales of video game titles hit £332.6 million in the final quarter of last year, up 19 per cent by volume and 36 per cent by revenue from the year before, according to figures released by the industry body ELSPA.

Over the full year, 78 million video games were sold in Britain. So who is playing them all?

The Byron review comes at a time when more families than ever are playing video games, thanks largely to the motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii console, which allows players to mimic the movements of real sport. For the first time since Space Invaders arrived in arcades 30 years ago, gaming is becoming a social and sociable activity. The Wii excels at on-screen sports such as table tennis and golf, and the reason for its popularity with both parents and children is that it brings the fun back into playing. Playing it is enjoyable and watching someone else flailing around with a remote controller is hilarious.

Yet the Wii is technically a primitive machine compared with its competitors, the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3). These two consoles, dubbed “next-generation” because they can display high-definition images on modern flat screen televisions, retain an undeniably masculine bias. These are the gorillas of gaming and many of the games are designed to get players beating their chests in an artificial world, to the exclusion of the real one.

Many of the early releases for these consoles were squarely aimed at young males, with a heavy emphasis on shooting, driving and sports. Both consoles are also capable of connecting to the internet, opening up the possibility of playing against hundreds of opponents online. It is this aspect of gaming, and the perceived target market, that has caused the most concern.

If, as expected, the Byron review comes out in favour of statutory certification, one option open to the makers of the consoles is to make the parental lock feature (currently installed as an option) the default setting. Adults would then need to key in a secret code to play the game of their choice.

But to label all gaming as “bad” is to do the industry a disservice. As with novels, films and internet websites, there are good and bad games, and the process of becoming engrossed in a well-told story is similar, whether it unfolds digitally or on the pages of a book. Many games, notably the 77-million-selling Japanese Final Fantasy series, tap into the market for modern myth, marrying storylines and are as satisfying to play – and as demanding – as chess.

Faced with the success of the Wii, Sony and Microsoft have recently changed marketing tack to get themselves out of the spare room and into the living room, repositioning themselves as home entertainment hubs.

Both machines can play DVDs. The Sony PS3 also plays high-definition Blu-ray discs and comes with a built-in hard drive that can be used to store photos, videos, music or content downloaded from the internet via the built-in wi-fi capability.

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