Video games have long been a popular form of entertainment. The typical conception of games as mindless toys for boys and corruptors of our children's innocence is, however, changing fast.

The Barbican Gallery's Game On exhibition is a celebration of games as a form of interactive, immersive art. It also demonstrates how games have influenced other forms, from film and TV, to music and the visual arts. Games are also environments for the development of the skills we need our children to learn. A child immersed for hours in a role-playing game is practising hand-eye co-ordination, exercising thinking skills and problem-solving, and is practising those skills through to success.

Although Game On, a partnership show between the Barbican Gallery and the National Museum of Scotland, is not the very first exhibition of games, it is the first in the UK. It is based on research that the curators have carried out in Japan and America, particularly at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, which houses a permanent display of games.

"There is beginning to be more documentation of the subject, more books have come out, and developers have become more canny at promoting the work they do," Conrad Bodman, Curator of Game On said. "There are now a number of personalities attached to the video gaming world, who have developed a profile and a following for their own individual work."

In recognition of these personalities, Game On features a range of original artwork by Yoshitaka Amano, whose conceptual art for the Final Fantasy series of games has been used as inspirational material for the games' designers, and by Ocean Quigley, who created the art for SimCity. Spaces such as the Barbican and the National Museum of Scotland may not seem like the kinds of venues, however, where you would expect to see video game art.

"As an arts space we're very interested in creative process, and video games are very creative things, from a design and technological perspective. Documenting the process in the rise of video games and the development of content is something an arts space should be doing."

Games are not just about effective visual artwork though. As evinced by the popularity of the Pokemon series of games, which are visually very basic, the development of characters and engaging narratives are equally as important. Children learn to interpret the world through narrating their own experiences to their friends; video games increasingly allow them to create exciting narratives and experiences, and to control characters as they wish. In short, video games can provide the motor for inspiring children's creativity.

"Games that have been most successful are those that are character-led, games such as Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog - it's the identity of the character which people buy into. Increasingly games companies are employing scriptwriters so that they can really understand the whole process of narrative and treat it in the same way that film directors would. It is now becoming much more difficult to distinguish a game from a film," according to Bodman. And the potential for children's learning is that as games increase in sophistication and demand ever more real responses, so too will children learn to deal, with more sophistication, with the demands made of them. These more realistic responses could, potentially, allow children to simulate the kinds of contributions that they will perform in the real world.

In terms of their international and cultural impact, it is estimated that the games industry is now worth more than the music industry. One startling fact displayed on the wall at Game On is that the economy that has grown around the online game EverQuest would equate to the wealth of the 77th richest in the world, between Russia and Bulgaria.

"There are supposedly thousands of people who 'go to work' on EverQuest as arrow forgers or something like that, and they sell their products to other people on EverQuest." It is not only the people who make games who make a living out of them now; players can do so too. In South Korea, where broadband internet connectivity is widespread, online game winners are as well-known and rewarded as Big Brother contestants in the UK.

But it is not only hard-core fanatics who are drawn into the world of gaming. A photographic installation by James Gooding at the exhibition tells the stories of a variety of video games fans, including young children, teenagers, and "a 60 year-old man who plays the Resident Evil games." With games increasing vastly in popularity over the last 30-40 years, several generations have now grown up playing them.

The impact stretches beyond such simple game-playing trends: architects such as b consultants "are using games as an interface to promote the work that they do", while other creative people, including contemporary artists and musicians, are using games technology outside of the games industry. The Ping installation by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena links three vintage arcade machines, allowing three users simultaneously to create a musical environment from a games interface. The popular PlayStation2 game Rez is a synthesis of music creation application and a 'shoot-'em-up' style game. Games are changing, and their impact is widening.

Within the next decade online games may well render software-based games redundant, Conrad Bodman believes. Games retail stores may go the same way, as players increasingly download software and play episodic games, bought in instalments week by week.

One of the other futures for games previewed at Game On is a hands-free application developed by Sony. Liquid Fire films viewers as they stand in front of a standard television, broadcasts it live, and then allows those viewers to add real-time effects by 'pressing' buttons on the image. I set myself on fire. Then saw myself just under the surface of a pool, my hands rippling the surface. Applications like this could well hold the key to enabling greater accessibility, not only to games, but to the potential of interactive television and the internet as well.

The application of games to education is also an area in which Conrad sees much potential. In the US, Lucas Arts have developed a number of programmes for young children under the Star Wars franchise. MIT are also at the forefront of creative development of games which actively promote learning. Their Games2Teach conceptual prototypes demonstrate how science, maths and environmental studies can form the basis for exciting games, across a range of platforms - from PC to PDA. Conrad said: "I'm sure that in the next 10 or 15 years products will come on the market which look in detail at subjects like pure maths - using friendly games interfaces to help people to learn, maybe remotely."

The argument that games are amoral and unrealistic "is completely flawed - I think it's more about kids having to teach their parents what games are about. I think as soon as more adults start playing games then they can immediately see the potential for learning about storytelling, about the whole design aspect of environments and characters, the whole issue of narrative."

With games now more popular than ever before, and including an increasing number of adult players, their influence is global and transcends age groups. Though graphical 'realism' may pose a barrier to games as creative, imaginative sites of engagement, and games such as Grand Theft Auto 3 continue to cause moral upset, games designers are beginning to take into account "more realistic content where you do make realistic judgments".

New Japanese 'communication games' such as Doko Demo Issyo and Animal Forest, in which players build relationships with characters, make communicative interaction the key focus. Built in to such activity is narrative creation and character development, two crucial areas in which children need to develop understanding in order to interpret their world, and the cultures and the people surrounding them. Games, in many ways, offer possibilities for rich learning experiences.

And my favourite game of the show? Go to www.triggerhappy.org to play Thomson and Craighead's Trigger Happy, a reworking of the classic arcade game Space Invaders, in which, instead of shooting down spaceships, you take pot shots at excerpts from Michel Foucault's essay What is the Author? Maybe this is the beginning of games as tool for critical analysis too...


Game On runs until 15 September 2002 at the Barbican Gallery, before relocating to The Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, from 3 October 2002 until February 2003, then tours Europe, America and Japan. See www.gameonweb.co.uk for details.