This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series Managing Monsters, given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994.

As I was going to the future entertainment show held in Olympia last year, I soon found I was the only woman waiting for the tube.

The station was unusually full for the middle of the

morning, with scattered young men in jeans and trainers, gaggles of young boys, one or two fathers.

When the train came and the carriage doors opened, a rather dazed-looking London pigeon fluttered

out. A man near me laughed. Don't worry, he said. It's only a virtual reality pigeon. I streamed into the show

with the crowd clutching my razzle-dazzle high-tech, impossible to forge ticket, and plunged into the

roaring hall. The video games industry has grown in value from almost nothing to 700 million pounds

over the last four years. On multiple screens,

the seasons new offerings in interactive play and 3D simulation were being triggered by the very

latest in ergonomic joy pads to keep bleeping, scrolling, beaming up, blasting, crashing,

bursting into flames and starting up again. I wasn't the only woman

any longer. There were one or two grannies, one or two mums. And the marketing staff on the

stalls were almost all women, skirt power to the trade, and they were selling and busking in green

bug costumes as zoososies or other technological gremlins.

But we were interlopers.

It was a man's world.

The customers and players were almost all boys.

In the chill-out zone in the gallery, at stands and on platforms,

the players of the banked consoles of games were busy zapping and slicing and chopping and headbutting and dragon punching.

Fight.

...