Despite the vast size of the market and the explosive growth in sales in recent years, videogames remain a creative medium whose potential is largely untapped. Commercially, gaming has emerged from the shadow of other industries such as film and music - but artistically, game creators still generally ride on the coat-tails of other arts and media.

That’s why a game like Spore is such a landmark. Here is a game that looks certain to be one of the biggest hits of the year. A a game with so much commercial potential that the world’s biggest game publisher, Electronic Arts, has talked about setting up a “Spore Division”, which would work exclusively on add-ons and fresh content for Spore.

Yet this game eschews the familiar, traditional approach of aping popular movies or television shows. Where other games strive to become fluent in the language of action movies or gritty crime shows, Spore boldly invents its own language — building an experience and a narrative that simply could not be conveyed in anything other than an interactive game.

This is not to say that copying films and television is a worthless pursuit. As the newest mass-market creative medium, videogames are a crossroads for all of the world’s other media - a meeting place where movies, music and interactivity can blend into thrilling, cinematic experiences.

However, Spore gives us a fresh glimpse of even greater potential for the medium. In Spore, we see the possibility for creators to build types of entertainment that are genuinely new — and to give the world’s game players experiences that were not possible with existing passive mediums.

Better yet, the game tells us that you don’t have to adopt the lingua franca of movies and television in order to be a commercial success. Spore is far from being a blueprint for the future of games, but it is an indication of the future potential of the medium.

Later this year, the horizons will hopefully widen further still, with the extraordinary LittleBigPlanet — a British-developed game that allows players to build their own puzzles and challenges, and then share them with one another through a YouTube-style online community.

Projects such as these are the mark of an industry whose huge financial success is finally being reflected in the confidence of its creative minds. Game designers are letting go of cinema’s coat-tails and taking increasingly bold steps into uncharted creative waters - even challenging the very definition of what constitutes a videogame. Games’ own lingua franca remains to be written — but we’re finally starting to see just how extensive the vocabulary of this exciting new language will be.

- Rob Fahey is a Computer Games Commentator

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