Having been fortunate enough to spend a large part of my career in and around the video games business, it was incredibly satisfying to see this industry sharing the stage with other creative arts like music, film and TV this week – as the BAFTA Game Awards took place in London on Wednesday.

The awards ceremony doesn’t quite match the grandness of those more established film and TV events but the fact there’s now an annual awards to celebrate the very best games demonstrates just how far we come. It was less than 20 years ago that I had to buy games from the small Games Exchange stall in Trowbridge market – but now you can buy them everywhere, even if I still find the specialists the best.

The global games industry is now worth more than £40bn a year – and the UK is the powerful heart in the development of many of the largest games. The UK is home of the Grand Theft Auto series – games steeped in the mobster underworld, games designed for adults with 18-rated storylines. The closest thing to the hysteria around Grand Theft Auto games were the scenes we saw for Harry Potter, people queuing across Wiltshire to buy at midnight and taking time off work to play the game first. The most recent release, Grand Theft Auto V became the most successful entertainment launch ever – beating all films, books and albums before it – taking £1bn worldwide in just five days.

I let out a knowing chuckle, when Dad suggests that being a man in his mid thirties who regularly plays games makes me some kind of weirdo. I remind him that it’s actually his age group, the recently retired, who are warmly embracing the world of video gaming. He doesn’t need to look far as I point him to my mother – sat in the other room solving crimes on her Nintendo 3DS handheld as Professor Layton.

Video games have come a long way from the days where I tried to persuade Dad that the series of blocks on the TV were a car, but with Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 now on sale, they now look like the motor you wished you could afford. Having persuaded Dad to pick up a tablet computer for the first time this year, with great success, I reckon I might he might be warming to the idea of becoming an armchair soldier.