Roger Bennett, co-organiser of the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival (August 10-14) and director-general of the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association (Elspa), the UK’s biggest trade body for games, wants to dispel once and for all the image of the games player as an oddball, bespectacled teenager.

"Several years ago, that might have been the case," he argues. "Now, though, the average age of a gamer is mid-20s. This is in part because games have been around for 20 years and recent GameVision research has highlighted that across Europe users are getting older and in the UK over 50 per cent of males aged 15 to 34 play games regularly. One in four women in that age group are regular games players.'

While Japan and the United States remain the major games consumer markets, Scotland is going from strength to strength in the development of PC and console games. With a community of highly successful games developers employing more than 500 people, Scotland was responsible for about a fifth of the £460m revenue generated by UK developers last year.

Industry visitors to the festival will have the opportunity to take part in the cultural debate about what the future holds for interactive entertainment, and co-organiser Brian Bagelow says that one of the most exciting new areas lies in interactive TV games. With more than seven million homes in the UK having access to Sky TV, he is sure that the format has huge potential. He also enthuses about the impact of wireless technology on the games industry and the expansion of games playing on to mobile phones installed with Java.

"Scotland is now one of the most innovative and talented places in the world for video games," he says. "With the number of companies growing here, there are now things going on that wouldn’t have been considered five years ago."

After riding through a rough spell over the last few years, Scotland's gaming industry seems to have consolidated and is poised for another period of expansion. It will be exciting to see what the future holds for gaming, one of the jewels in the crown of British creative industries.