It hasn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, my living room was a sanctuary, a safe, peaceful place, a serene retreat at the end of the working day.

It was not a place I came to make use of an imitation Fender Stratocaster, 3D goggles and an oversized red beanbag with integrated speakers. But like millions of others, I have fallen victim to the cult of the videogame accessory.

In the world of the gaming geek, life was simple: whether swinging a tennis racquet or firing a gun, all you had to do was press a button. These days, you have to swing a tennis racquet or fire a gun.

The result? We’re knackered, our credit cards are close to melting and our homes look as if they’ve been decorated by hyperactive four-year-olds. It’s all an awfully long way from Space Invaders.

“A lot of people’s living rooms are full up with a lot of c***,” says Tim Ingham, editor of industry bible MCVuk.com

“You can turn your console off, but you’ve still got plastic drums, a plastic guitar, a dance mat, Wii Fit, a steering wheel. You basically have to throw your sofa away to fit it all in.”

Not so long ago, it was quite possible to enjoy the full range of the console experience with nothing more than a nondescript grey box and a couple of sophisticated remote controls. But over the past few years, the peripheral has become the games industry’s great cash cow.

With the broadening of the target audience has come an enormous increase in potential profit.

“It’s a market everyone’s trying to get into,” says Nick Gibson, an analyst at Games Investor Consulting.

DJing and skateboarding have been added to the range of physical activities you never thought you’d do on your own in your front room.

Of course, there have been plenty of pedestrian skateboarding games that no one gave two hoots about, and the main reason no one has made a DJing game before now is that, out of context, there is nothing at all fun about watching a little digital person put on a new song just because you told him to.

But introduce an actual board, or a set of decks, and all that changes.

Suddenly the game’s narrow conceit is retooled in a way that makes it possible, if you have a couple of drinks and engage your imagination and half-shut your eyes, to pretend you really are wowing the crowd with your kickflip or your scratching.

It’s not a new concept – back in 1984, the thoroughly underwhelming NES title Duck Hunt flew the flag for light-gun enthusiasts everywhere, and a Japanese title called Guitar Freaks tried to colonise the territory that later music titles made their own in 1989. The difference is, this time it’s cool.

The sleek design most accessories now bear is a million miles from the clunky light guns of yore; and the songs you can play and the stars you can pretend to be are credible.

“It’s about letting people know what kind of interaction they can have right away,” says Alex Wiltshire, online editor of Edge magazine.

“They know what the game is going to be about. Guitar Hero wouldn’t be fun playing on a pad – it would just be abstract.”

Guitar Hero is, of course, one of the two unmissable landmarks in this new epoch: the other is the Wii.

The remarkable thing is how entirely unheralded both concepts were. Why, the gaming cognoscenti sneered, would anyone want to put their joypad buttons on the end of a silly little plastic guitar?

And why would anyone give up the infinitely superior processing power of an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3 in favour of waving their arms about in front of the technically limited Nintendo equivalent? The thing is, the gaming cognoscenti do not have a particularly strong overlap with the mainstream cognoscenti.

It’s that lack of intersection that goes a long way towards explaining how the perceived wisdom was so wrong. Thanks to people who didn’t particularly like computer games, but did like having a laugh with their mates after a night at the pub, Guitar Hero sold $2bn (R16.3 billion) worth of units worldwide in 2009; and in 2008, Nintendo sold £481m (R6 billion) worth of Wiis, putting them £38m ahead of Microsoft and £147m ahead of Sony.

The commercial benefits from exploiting such a market are huge. Swathes of coveted floor space at shops are now devoted to accessories, and their online competitors are scrambling to catch up.

Online emporium, MadCatz, will sell you a range of wholly unnecessary plug-ins for Guitar Hero and Rock Band, from the aforementioned imitation Stratocaster to a microphone stand with special control pad attachments.

Nor are these gizmos at the extreme verge of gaming extras: you can get golf clubs, and special vibrating chairs, and windbreaks for that mic.

“For the amount you’re spending on console extras you could be setting up a home studio and learning to play the guitar for real,”

says Ingham.

It doesn’t take a genius to surmise the commercial logic behind this. Besides opening up the games market to a new audience, such accoutrements also have the benefit of being relatively cheap to produce, and yet bafflingly expensive to the consumer.

“All the consumer gets is a lump of plastic. But the fact is the player doesn’t view it that way,” says Ingham.

“Core gamers are annoyed by the pricing, there’s no question. They have always grumbled and will continue to do so, but they will still be the bread and butter of the industry. The only people any of the games publishers are worried about alienating are the new gamers.”

Already, the plug-in peripheral looks like it might be on the verge of being superseded. The launch at industry fair E3 of Microsoft and Sony’s sophisticated “Wii Killer” set-top cameras seems to promise a means of playing games without having to contend with any kind of gadget at all. Looking around the detritus strewn across my living room, that certainly sounds like a blessing.

Still, for some of us, even that degree of freedom will be unwelcome. For us, gaming will always, in the end, be primarily about sitting hunched over a glorified keyboard getting blisters from hammering away at the buttons slightly harder than necessary.

“The controller can still deliver gaming experiences that are vital and can’t be taken over by other things,” says Wiltshire.

“There’s something about a joystick that still works.” –

The Independent

Hungry for more scitech news? Sign up for our daily newsletter