Whatever your opinion on joystick pleasures, 'Games: into the real? at the ICA, showed that in many ways gaming has become the ultimate convergence experience and one of the first 'real' chances to flirt with truly immersive silicon environments.The event pulled together a host of gaming illuminate whose presentations highlighted the underlying themes driving games culture. Should games be considered 'serious' art? What is the role of narratives in interactive media? Are games changing our perception of time and space?For JC Herz, author of Joystick Nation, the one game which encapsulates, where you play out the lives of a fictional household who bear more than a passing resemblance to us. It all ends up in a reflexive end zone with the observer wondering who is simm-ulating who? Another example of gaming imitating life and vice versa came via Dan Snyder - a man determined to bring the reality of war to our screens. His remake of Doom (the ultimate mid-90s geek badge of honour) was so realistic the US Marine's used it for combat training. They especially liked its invocation of the 'fog of war feeling'. While Synder maybe coming from the dark side of gaming, he still shares a common bond, the desire to cast a spell over the gamer and transport him/her into an alternative space for better or worse.What happens once they get into that space? One man with an answer is Edward Watson founder of the Playing Fields - a physical play area where networked computers allow for multi-player environments. Watson's aim is to explore gaming as a social experience via tournaments and leagues. He hopes that one day cyberatheltes and celebrity gamers will emerge and your average punter will pay to watch them compete just as we do today with

sport.Arguably the most interesting presentations came from John Sanborn of Lefong and Pete Molyneux of Bullfrog Productions. Two names which may not resonate beyond hardcore initiates, but two men with the killer app for next generation gaming: ideas. Sanborn has been pushing the fold for a number of years having shown his interactive game Psychic Detective as a live theatre performance at the Sundance Festival in 1996 (he got Harvey Keitel to play the game/movie live). More recently he has been working on Lumen for sci-fi webzine fandom.com. The 'game' is based around a conspiracy theory connected to prime numbers. The gamer activates an artificial lifeform/mathematical sprite-the lumen- which starts to crave data shit or 'scurff' (URLs to you and me) which the gamer must feed it. The lumen then opens an email dialogue with the user who at one stage is asked for their mobile phone number. (This is because the lumen is under attack and needs to migrate to the mobile network to survive). The killer bit is when the lumen calls the gamer out of the blue and starts talking to them via an Interactive Voice Recognition app. The game works on the principal of all good sci-fi mixing reality and fantasy rather than trying to create new, often unconvincing worlds (think Fifth Element).Pete Molineux is working along similar lines and has positioned an ultimate gaming challenge with a new project entitled 'black and white'. The game 'starts' with a new world, its day one, year zero and the gamer can do whatever s/he wants to. You are God, and the game will develop according to how you interact but it also has a narrative running throughout forcing the gamer to make decisions. To help the gamer has a pet which 'learns' how to behave by observing your actions. The code for the creature took years to develop. It is based on systems theory for emergent properties and is both context shaped and context shaping literally taking on a life of its own.Closing the day was John Freedman offering us Playstation 2. Sadly the console and supporting promo movie looked flat: same old games but higher res. To his credit Freedman gave up speaking time to let Molyneux's explain his alchemy in greater detail.The next chapter in gaming is likely to be a show down between Sony and Microsoft competing for control of the console market. As with many things in the realm of convergence the cool stuff (i.e., non-linear narratives, emergent AI characters and cross platform environments) will taking place at the periphery of the industry.