There’s a huge debate in the media at the moment about violence and computer games. It reminds me a bit of the time when parents debated the effect of Grange Hill on young minds. The BBC even had a live debate featuring parents in cords. Don’t laugh – it actually happened.

During May a large number of games companies, including Id, Sony and Eidos, were cited in a $130 million lawsuit by the families of three victims killed in last year’s school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Another massacre, this time in Littleton, Colorado, further fuelled media hysteria. Computer games create killers, or so they say at least.

For the record, I’d like to say that I think it’s totally unfair to blame this kind of violence on games. I would suggest that it’s the laws that allow people to walk around with more guns than a small army that might be the problem. That this doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world with anything like the same frequency would seem to support this. In Europe and Japan we play the same games, watch the same movies and listen to the same music, so why doesn’t this sort of thing happen here? The reason: guns.

Having said that though, if the games industry is actually serious about becoming mass-market then we have to start taking more responsibility for what we create. We need to come up with more creative and imaginative ways of engaging people in the increasingly complex environments we create. Gratuitously killing everything that moves seems like a pretty basic premise for a game, even if you are doing it in gloriously realised graphical worlds. I think that up to now that’s been great, after all we all love our Quake. But for how much longer can we justify churning out the same stuff? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that certain types of game will die out, as there will always be a place for deathmatching. I just think that we will start to see a new breed of games that hitherto we could have only dreamed of.

After making Theme Park I spent a lot of time thinking about the reasons why the game was as successful as it was. I still find it hard to believe that it’s sold over four million units. It’s still in the top twenty, five years after its release. One of the main reasons for its success, I think, is that there’s no violence in it at all. Many women and children bought and played Theme Park for this reason.I’ve been looking at game sales over the last couple of years and there are a number of games that have been extraordinarily successful without so much as a gun in sight. Sim City 3000 has already sold over two million copies. Microsoft’s Flight Sim ’98 has sold a staggering four million copies. Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Designer ‘game’ got to number one in the charts in the States. At the very least these games prove that you don’t need large amounts of blood to make a hit game.

There are two reasons why games have historically relied heavily on violence. Firstly, gamesplayers were typically adolescent (or at least the first generation was). Secondly, the technology limited gaming environments, making interaction on a level above the immediate and violent impractical.

Before the Playstation revolution, a very large number of gamers were men aged 16 to 25. Violence obviously appeals as a theme, a fact reflected by the success of games like Doom. However, in the space of a few years these very same people have become largely atypical of the gaming demographic as a whole. The adoption of games into the mainstream has created a new generation of gamers who aren’t 16 to 25 years old and very probably aren’t even blokes. The original generation of gamers are now in their late 20s. As the games-playing demographic broadens so must the games themselves.

It’s not like we can blame the technology anymore. In terms of their ability to interact with players socially early computers were distinctly Cro-Magnon. Killing is a very basic interaction and one that’s comparatively simple to program. Anything more than that is considerably harder. It was inevitable that most games would involve interaction in the form of killing and being killed. Now it’s all changed. The advent of powerful computers and sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques allows for ever more complicated forms of interaction. These open up a world of gameplay opportunities. Computer worlds will be populated by intelligent agents with a range of cognitive skills and emotions (like jealousy, hatred and fear). It’s no accident that Sony’s next generation Playstation chip is called the "Emotion Engine."

Advances in two areas of programming in particular have made this possible. Computer games programmers are now right at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence (or AI ) and in some cases, are actually leading it. Games like the Sims (by Maxis) utilise Simulation and AI technology to create virtual worlds that live, breathe and exist independently of player participation. The incredible advances in 3D graphics are allowing us to create worlds that are increasingly photorealistic. Improved graphics help to sustain the illusion of reality, making game worlds more believable and more immersive. What all of this does is allow games designers to create more ambitious games designs. Or at least it should.

As games designers, we should be looking to push the medium forward by looking at more sophisticated topics. The industry as whole can be narrow minded and self-referential. The approach of the next generation Playstation should encourage us to compete with more traditional forms of entertainment like film and that means tackling subjects other than death and destruction. I’m not suggesting making a game based on coal-miners in Nineteenth Century Sheffield, rather that we should take a step back and try something that isn’t just a computerisation of toy soldiers or Cowboys and Indians. I’m talking about creating more complex worlds where players enter alternate realities so convincing and so involving that they experience the whole gamut of emotions. And personally, I can’t wait for the day when games come along that will spearhead this revolution and light up the way.

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