There is no doubt in my mind that a computer born, intelligent entity which to all intents and purposes can be considered "alive" will be created before we, or those involved in its creation, are ready for it. Whether or not this should be done is a moral question in itself but when it happens, as is human nature, such technology will be put to ill use while lessons are learnt. Entertainment is as good a place to start as any. Remember Dolly the sheep? Computer games are lucrative. Where better to apply a new technology than in an industry that will generate plenty of trailing zeros in a company's bank balance?

Obviously, this isn't going to happen over night and most likely not even in the next decade, but slowly and surely technology will creep forward and the artificial intelligence in your copy of the latest gaming craze will become more advanced, quite possibly to the point of artificial life. The question you will have to ask yourself is could you bring yourself to shoot and "kill" a group of pixels behind which sits a tiny program which has learnt that you are not to be trusted when you've had a bad day at work, an argument with your spouse and a few beers?

Killing of course is a slightly ambiguous term in this kind of scenario. What would it actually mean? Deleting all an entity's data from memory? Or just knocking it down a peg or two and forcing it to regenerate itself? Having to rebuild your entire physical self would be enough to put a dampener on anyone's day I should imagine. Would characters notice each other disappearing and mourn their loss? What happens if they have memories of past lives due to shoddy memory garbage collection? Will games manufacturers be required to provide in game counselling services and optional séances to characters between levels or would the gamer simply be faced by sprites with rather serious grudges and revenge on their minds? Perhaps I'm being a little extreme, but they aren't wholly inconceivable ideas.

In games now, the click of a mouse button does nothing but refresh the display on your screen, sans which ever body part the person that was mown down by your machine gun has lost. One day, it could be a digital life. At what point will that life be advanced enough to make your trigger finger pause for thought? Games such as the Sims would take on a new meaning, in effect extreme reality TV in which you could mess with the contestants' minds to your hearts content. Let's face it, we feel little remorse watching people fall apart in the Big Brother house and I doubt that many people given full control over that situation would choose to be truly benevolent towards their playthings. The temptation for chaos would be a little too great to resist.

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