Something has gone badly wrong with video games. Once the exclusive domain of geeky boys, gaming has become not just socially acceptable but, well, actually quite popular with normal people.

This sad state of affairs is the unfortunate consequence of a long-running de-nerdification of the video games industry:

• 1947 - The first ever video game, entitled Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, is invented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Ph.D. Due to the high cost of the experimental equipment required, the game can only be played by a handful of top-level government scientists.

• 1961 - At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a group of students create a game they call Spacewar! Unlike its predecessor, the game does not require a laboratory oscilloscope to play, and can be enjoyed by any expert level programmer with access to a $120,000 mainframe computer.

• 1977 - Home computers become popular with an entire generation of bright but socially dysfunctional young men. Since the primitive graphics of these systems are as yet incapable of displaying pornography, the young men largely use these computers to program video games instead.

• 1981 - Rumours of a woman sighted playing video games are widely dismissed as a hoax.

• 1985 - Companies like Nintendo and SEGA release commercial consoles designed specifically for the purpose of playing video games. A pivotal point in video gaming history, players are now able to enjoy games without any significant programming skills at all.

• 1994 - Sony launches the original PlayStation games console, which achieves mainstream popularity across the 13-25 year old male demographic. This signals the beginning of the end for gaming as an exclusively geeky past-time, as even socially popular, well-adjusted young men become interested in video games.

• 2006 - With the release of its Wii console, Nintendo achieves something entirely unexpected and which many thought impossible: women are suddenly interested in playing video games. The market is transformed, and a nerdy sub-culture with a proud (albeit socially awkward) history is finally destroyed as video-gaming becomes a mainstream entertainment medium.

The transformation has been rapid and profound. If, just five years ago, you were at a polite house party full of mingling thirty-somethings, and somebody said “Hey, who wants to play video games?” they would have been expected to put down their class of Chablis immediately and leave in shame. But now it seems that no social gathering is complete without a roomful of people crooning along with Singstar, murdering a song on Guitar Hero, or flailing wildly around to Dance Dance Revolution.

You might think it makes perfect sense: singing, dancing and playing music have always been perfectly acceptable at parties, so what’s the big deal? The point is that none of that would have happened unless gaming somehow crossed over from being a geeky boy hobby to something enjoyed by the mainstream - and that, crucially, required women to learn to love video games.

At a family get-together this Christmas my partner’s 60 year old mother was introduced to the Nintendo Wii for the first time. A few rounds of Wii Golf later she was hooked and filled with glee at finally beating her husband after years of failing to do so on real golf courses. A couple of days later she phoned to tell us that they had bought a Wii of their own.

How did this happen? Games manufacturers have spent decades trying to open up the female market with nothing but dismal failure to reward their efforts. How did Nintendo manage to turn that situation on its head almost overnight?

The Boring Bit

Since the mid-eighties, manufacturers of video game consoles have been engaged in an arms race to produce ever more powerful machines that are capable of playing increasingly complex and visually impressive games. Like all arms races, it has become incredibly expensive, with the industry leaders investing vast sums of money on research and development so that every three years or so they can produce a new machine that can claim to be the most powerful on the market.

The PlayStation 3, arguably the most powerful of the current crop of consoles, packs so much processing punch that academic institutions have discovered they can build a passable supercomputer by plugging a handful of them together, at a fraction of the cost of buying or (more commonly) renting a genuine supercomputer.

A struggling Nintendo simply couldn’t match that kind of technology, so it went off in a different and unexpected direction. In doing so it changed the video games industry forever.

The actual technical guts of the Nintendo Wii are almost a generation out of date compared to machines such as the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The real change was simply in the way people control their games on the Wii: instead of mashing a complex selection of buttons with their fingers and thumbs, players could now control their on-screen characters by mimicking the desired movements whilst holding a motion-sensing controller. In a golf game, you swing the controller like a club; in a boxing game you hold a controller in each fist and make shadow boxing motions; you can use it as a sword, drumstick, steering wheel or almost any other accessory.

The change was revolutionary. Before, video games often required players to climb a steep learning curve just to master the controls before they could start having fun, but thanks to Wii’s simple control system, games suddenly became intuitive. You could start having fun instantly. You could even teach a grandmother to play in a matter of minutes.

Combined with the fact that Nintendo games have always tended to be simpler, more accessible and more family friendly than the complex, violent and, essentially male-focused games found on other consoles, plus the growing popularity of social games like Singstar and Dance Dance Revolution, this created enough force to push video gaming into the mainstream.

This is all well and good: now that video games are fluffy and inclusive maybe the Daily Mail will stop screaming for them to be banned,  and maybe some of us old-school gamers might finally be able to shake off the ‘anti-social dork’ stigma. But for all that, it does kind of feel like the grown-ups have crashed our party. Just like your favourite band selling out and going mainstream, now that the industry has found a much wider audience it seems inevitable that games will never be quite as cool as they were in the early days and mass-market appeal will take priority over the edgy creativity that made it all so much fun to begin with.

Lance Concannon is the editor of The Pamphleteer

twitter.com/concannon