This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 16, released in August 2007

Put yourself in this situation: you're an enthusiastic gamer, you've played your fair share of the latest releases, you humbly proclaim yourself supreme overlord of Counter-Strike, and you regularly peruse your copy of the latest 'zines. For all intents and purposes, some may call you a hardcore gamer.

One day, you stumble into your friend's room and find him sitting in the corner with a Gameboy Advance, hunched over it like a guilty teenager caught reading Playboy – except the hunch isn't inspired by guilt. In fact, your friend hasn't even noticed you entering the room. He's completely absorbed with the little machine's electronic antics. You begin to wonder what the heck is going on. After all, this friend is not a gamer.Not by a long shot. He doesn't even know how to play Quake. In fact, you'd be surprised if he even knew that the game existed. Yet there he's sitting, enthralled by a Gameboy.

Surprising, but cute. The poor bugger's trying to dabble in a world he has no idea about! At this point, a strange paternal instinct kicks in (either that, or a subconscious urge to go laugh at him), so you go to see how he's doing with his foray into gaming. Then comes the next surprise.

"Oh, this old thing? I've had it for ages, play it every day."

Turns out he loves Gameboy. He also shows you his collection of bookmarked web games, puzzle titles and miscellaneous gaming doohickeys. All this time, he's been gaming even more than you had, and you never had a clue. You've sat with your AAA titles and large-scale LAN events for all that time without a hint of what lay beyond your own small gaming world.

Yes. Small.

Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that gaming as we know it is only the tip of the iceberg. Sure, the big titles out there receive the press attention, the rave reviews and the competitive events, but in the eyes of the industry, our world is but an afterthought – a sugarcoated entity which garners attention but is ultimately shallow. Under the radar, an estimated 60 million people are heavily involved in the world of casual gaming, an industry which is already worth about $350 million.

These numbers are set to increase radically in the next few years as gaming becomes even more accessible and appealing to the mainstream. And game developers need to cotton on to this idea.