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    Like other creative media, though, the most important single variable between any online game and its users is something less easily quantified than efficiency, accuracy or ease of use – enjoyment. An entirely feedback-led product also tends to be a boring product, something that contradicts the entire point of a game. It’s a fine balance between creativity and responsiveness that Segerstråle sees as one of the defining features of the games industry in the future – and that other media would do well to attend to. ‘The trick is not to get lost in the data. That means figuring out what desirable behaviour is on the part of your players, and the skill set for doing that tends to be quite different from the skill set of dreaming up something original, which is a projection of what you think is right in a game. One big challenge for structuring games companies in the future is going to be finding the right balance between being both creatively led and reacting to data.’
    As other media have discovered, the constant feedback that a digital product offers can be as disturbing as it is informative: noting which articles get the most hits and provoke the most comments on a newspaper website is, for instance, not necessarily a good guide to either their quality or the benefits they bring to the company in terms of public perception and willingness to spend. In a data-driven age, however, games are out there on their own in terms of both the quantity and quality of information on players’ actions they offer, not to mention the potential sophistication of relationships they offer between fellow players, and between players and the company.
    One corner of the Playfish office is devoted to player feedback and, as Segerstråle puts it, ‘you’d be amazed at the stuff people send in’. Stuck to the wall are drawings and photographs that people have made of their virtual pets in Playfish’s hit game Pet Society , including, in one case, a snapshot of a two-foot-high cat knitted out of thick blue yarn. It is, he notes, not what the media conventionally thinks of as a typical gamer’s enthusiasm, although it’s in fact far more mainstream than most of the violence that tends to dominate press coverage. ‘The people who want to blow things up in games are a narrow bunch. What we are doing has a broader appeal. In the past, so much of the game world has been focused on these very male fight-or-flight emotions, really until the Wii it was like this. We recently did a game on Facebook called Restaurant City , which is all about working with your friends in a restaurant. It’s completely non-traditional, but that title has grown faster than any of our previous games.’
    Increasingly, it seems, the games industry has discovered that the most successful games of all are those that come closest to real life, not in terms of ever more expensively produced realistic sounds and images, but in terms of the range of social interactions and opportunities for expression they offer: simple, fundamental things, done well, that are a pleasure to share with friends or while away a few moments on a smart phone during a commute. This is far from the sum total of gaming, but it is its nimblest and fastest-growing sector, and reveals, rather like Spacewar! did, the full potential of computing machines, not as isolated marvels, but as interfaces with the human world.
    Finally, while it is the players who are the ultimate test of any game’s success, it is also the workers who are the test of any industry’s vigour. And gaming, here, is enjoying a golden dawn. According to a survey of teen career preferences by MTV, ‘video game designer’ now tops the league of aspirations, beating astronaut, sports star and actor. The best and the brightest are flocking towards the medium, drawn by its incredible growth and potential for innovation, by its increasing cultural dominance, and by the sheer diversity and creative energy it represents: