Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution didn’t realize that video games are as big as they are. My uncle, who was one of the lead programmers on the last couple revisions of the PC version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf, tells me that more money gets spent on video games that on movies. According to the NY Times article Tabarrok links to, the computer industry earned $28 billion in 2002.

One reason that video games are growing in popularity is that, unlike movies, video games aren’t passive entertainment and playing the most of the popular games is a social experience. Games such as Counter-Strike (the most popular game played over the Internet) requires communication and coordination between the team members to win each round. Video games also give people new ways to compete against eachother and do it in ways not possible in real life. While good movies make us forget about the world for a couple hours, video games put us in another world, and they let us interact with it.