Battleship, for those of you who never played, has a simple mechanic - two players set up their navy ships on a peg board, hidden from the other guy. You take turns plugging a peg into your side of the board, with each peg hole designated by a letter/number coordinate grid. When you plug a peg in, you say where you put it - E4! If your opponent has a ship in that coordinate (or part of one, actually), they say, sorrowfully, "Hit!" and you register that peg hole with a color to indicate a hit. If not, you just put in a neutral peg to remind you that you already tried that spot. The game continues into one player has sunk all the other guys ships.

The mechanic I'm experimenting with is simpler. One person places their ships using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game grid. When the player who's trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit, they call into the game engine and say "drop". The game reads back the coordinates at which the "peg" was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits one of the ships, it's a Hit, otherwise it's a miss.

His new game "Spore," still under development at Electronic Arts, is built wholly around this phenomenon. Players will control a species at it evolves from single-cell organism all the way to interstellar space-traveling "Galactic God," creating the look and personality of the species and, later on, the tools, cities, and even planets they used and inhabited.

The game is created so that simple choices on the part of the consumer--mouth shape, leg placement and so on--will be amplified by the computer's physics and behavior models to create creatures worthy of a Pixar movie, he said.

But the real secret weapon for the game is that each player's creations will be uploaded to the company and then downloaded to other player's computers. Once a species reaches space, for example, it will visit other worlds inhabited entirely by cities full of beings created inside another player's game.

"Instead of putting players in the role of Luke Skywalker, or Frodo Baggins, I'd rather put them in the role of George Lucas," Wright said.

"I would like to create a playground for children," he said. "A normal playground is flat but I want an undulating one, with bumps."

At first glance, this seems a strange ambition for a game designer. But Mr Takahashi has a degree in sculpture and Katamari is all about a tactile world.

And he believes children should spend more time in the physical world and less time wrapped up in the virtual world of games.

From Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to the University of Colorado, at least 50 schools around the country now offer courses in video game study, development or design, according to industry groups.

Some of the schools offer full-blown academic programs. The University of Washington offers a certificate in game design; the Art Institute of Phoenix gives a bachelor of arts in game art and design; and the University of Pennsylvania has a master's in computer graphics and game technology.

Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said the high number of schools adding programs in the past few years shows how the game industry is maturing.

Della Rocca said that in the early "Space Invader" days of game development, one developer could mentor a handful of workers. Now, games can cost $10 million to develop and require 200 workers, making the industry hungrier for specialized skills.