Touchscreens and motion sensors have opened up the gaming world to a market resistant to controllers

I WOULD not consider myself a gamer, nor would the games market. Like a lot of women of a certain era, the only computer game I have played from beginning to end is Brøderbund’s Myst.

Myst was a groundbreaking game in the 1990s and broke all records by selling in the millions, even reaching audiences games did not typically reach – like women and older people – probably because you didn’t need to shoot things into a bloody pulp and instead played by solving difficult problems.

But it is now so far in the distant past in gaming terms that a lot of people have never heard of it (yes, that does make me feel ancient).

Yet when I was growing up, I liked arcade games and, really, I should have made a natural transition into the emerging world of computer games and console games. But I just never did.

Then, along came the touchscreen iPhone and the iPad and – coming soon – Microsoft’s Kinect, a games controller that basically reads your body movements, so that you play games by actually doing the movements the characters in the game would be doing.

Suddenly I am playing games and have every intention of adding Kinect to my (generally unused) Xbox console when it is released in mid-November.

The common feature of these three items is that there is no controller, in the traditional sense.

You don’t have to remember keyboard or handset key combinations.

You don’t have to figure out buttons, joysticks, a mouse or other things that may feel fully natural to some people, but are one gigantic and confusing barrier to many others.

I wrote recently about how I had been surprised at how compelling I had found games on the iPad.

The motion sensors built into the device and the touchscreen interface mean you can hold the iPad and, say, use it as a steering wheel for a driving or flying game in a quite natural movement that mimics what you would be doing in a car or plane (well, if you were holding a rectangular steering wheel, but you know what I mean).

It means you can play pinball by tapping the side of the screen with your thumbs as if you were operating the flippers on an arcade game.

You can move characters around or create barriers and build things in other games by simply dragging and dropping with your fingertips.

Now, for the first time in my life I have been buying games – a lot of games.

Last week, I got a crack at Kinect. Kinect has been described as being similar to the Wii console because you can play a game using body movements.

Really though, this is a major step beyond, because you don’t need to hold anything, you just use your body.

You run in place to get your character to run. You jump to make it jump. You steer with your hands to direct a vehicle, leaning forward to accelerate and back to slow down. You flail your hands and feet to whack a ball around.

All of this is even more fun if you have someone standing next to you to play against.

The sensation is initially quite strange, then you settle in to this weird but natural form of interaction. It is very intuitive and it drops the barriers for people like me who just found the user interface between me and most games too much of an annoying hurdle.

A lot of the games that are being sold for the iPad and iPhone, and which were shown at the sneak preview of Kinect, would fall into the catchment of so-called “casual games”. You don’t shoot or fight things or plan military campaigns or raids. Instead, you play with objects and solve problems.

Casual games are already a huge and often unnoticed (by the “regular” gamer) market. Recent statistics from the US indicate the average casual gamer is a woman in her mid-40s playing online, but they attract all sorts. They go to dedicated websites and to places like Facebook, in their millions, to play.

Now the genre is moving into devices like the iPad, where players also are able to compete online against each other.

I am absolutely sure they will also become a significant part of the Kinect market. The device is relatively inexpensive – it will be about €150, although it will need to be connected to an Xbox. That makes the price barrier pretty low for some very cutting-edge technology.

Those new people coming across from the computer-based casual games market to consoles and devices are going to rapidly expand the gaming market generally.

They are also going to start trying some of the kinds of games they would not have played before, because these new interfaces make gameplay so much easier and fun.

That’s definitely why I have found myself becoming a bit of a gamer, late in the day.

I think other people who might have been similarly put off are going to find these new formats very compelling, too, and will try their hand (and feet and head) at games in different genres, expanding the market as whole.