Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Aure Ugunbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

If you were listening to the Intelligence at the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine,

you'll recall some truly haunting dispatches from a resident of Kharkiv we were in touch with.

Today we'll check back in with him to see how the intervening year has been.

First up though.

Video games have come a long way since the days of Donkey Kong.

In the last 50 years they've evolved from crude blocky 8-bit bloops into sophisticated worlds that are often perpetually online with their own virtual economies.

Last year some 3.2 billion people played video games. That's about 4 and 10 people worldwide.

Thanks in part to a big jump in lockdowns.

And all those extra players mean big business and a leveled up influence for game makers globally.

Gaming's becoming a really huge industry. It's now much bigger every year in terms of its value than the cinema box office.

It's bigger than video streaming, bigger than the music business.

Tom Wainwright is the economist, tech and media editor.

And as it comes to rival television as the main entertainment medium,

I think the question is how is this going to affect society?

Tom, just how big his gaming become?

Well it depends which estimate you go by, but by one estimate consumers are going to spend about $185 billion this year just on gaming content.

And that doesn't include hardware or the advertising business that increasingly comes with the video games industry.

That's about 5 times the value of the cinema box office, about 5 times the value of recorded music.

I mean I remember when I was a teenager, games were a thing for children and teenagers and mostly boys.

And now that's really changed. I saw a study from here in the UK showing that among people in their 50s and 60s,

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