Yet another sign games have "arrived"

The other night I went to a cocktail party with a bunch of 30- and 40-somethings. Very suburban, very yuppie. Lawyers, business owners, aerospace engineers... I was surprised that I was the only microsoft guy there.

So it's party gathering time in the kitchen, people are arriving, giving the hostess bottles of wine, fancy cheesecakes from high-end bakeries, cheeses from places whose name must be worked into the conversation in order to point out how much the cheese cost (and therefore how good it must be). I felt a little like John Cusack in High Fidelity in that scene with Catherine Zeta-Jones, only replace "music-loving counter-culture dude" with "game geek".

Anyhow, at one point someone goes into the den to say hi to the hostesses kids, comes out afterward and says "I see you have Dance Dance Revolution.", to which the hostest nods yes.

"So do you play it too?"

Hostest replies "Yes. And I'm pretty good. I play it at medium level".

And then everyone else chimes in about how they play too, what level they play at, what kind of game pad they use (same yuppie tone used for the camembert: "You really MUST get the metal pad. It's SO much better").

I chuckled to myself that the one game industry person in the room was the only one who's never played :-) (I'm holding off until my 360 purchase. Though the praise for Guitar Hero may have me getting that first).

Anyhow. If that's not a good example about games in the mainstream I don't know what is.