ABC's Jonathan Silverstein (who promises he'll be popping by our party in Brooklyn tomorrow) has an interesting piece up about the game industries metamorphosis. No, not into a giant talking cockroach, but from Geek to Chic.

It's hardly news anymore that the average video game player is over 30, that millions of women across the globe are gaming or that it's big business akin to the movie industry.

It's possible that gaming has become so commonplace that few have bothered to realize that it might just be ... cool.

His story, which includes quotes from a ton of gaming writers and analysts and mentions the likes of Paris Hilton and Apple, reminds me of a conversation I had with EA's Larry Probst long, long ago.

We were talking about why, at the time, the Rocky didn't yet have a fulltime gaming writer. Instead, I was writing the gaming stuff on the side as I worked fulltime as a police reporter. Part-time game writers were the norm for newspapers at the time.

Probst was pointing out that newspapers had fulltime movie critics, television critics and music critics, he even offered to fly to Denver to meet with the paper's publisher. And then he said something that really summed up gaming's inevitable rise to not just the mainstream, but mass popularity. He said that in 20 years, maybe less, the president of the United States will most likely be a gamer.

Wow. Brian Crecente

From Geek to Chic: Record Sales Signal Video Games' Arrival [ABC News]

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