My family are not gaming obsessives. But there’s no question that screen-based games are starting to make inroads into the nooks and crannies of our daily lives.

Some of the games we play are as a group – while others are solitary experiences. So during the course of a typical day, at least one of us will have played on the Wii, the Xbox, Club Penguin, online poker, an online swords and sorcery world, a casual online gaming site (Miniclip) or a mobile/handheld device.

Today, for example, my son built me a mediaeval village on the condition I joined his warrior tribe. As I say, we’re not 24/7 gaming immersives. But it seems clear to me that the increased time we spend with games must have an impact on: a) the way we watch TV; and b) the amount of time we watch TV. The main victims of our gaming habit are the not-very-compelling shows that used to pass for passive relaxation TV. For us, the passive TV mode has been replaced by gaming, social networking, browsing through eBay, YouTube, etc.

The only TV that has really survived the onslaught of online is the handful of shows that we, between us, find truly compelling.

At first sight, this doesn’t seem to fit the perceived pattern – which is that TV viewing is going up in developed economies. I’ve puzzled over this trend for a while and concluded that rising TV figures don’t equate to greater satisfaction with the medium.

More likely is the fact that there are more TVs in more rooms acting as a kind of visual radio. I know our TV set is hardly ever off, except when we go out. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we are watching it.

Right now, for example, I’m writing this in the study while Indiana Jones plays to a deserted front room.

It’s not all bad news for TV, of course. Like cinema, TV has shown itself capable of delivering massive water-cooler events. Idol, Super Bowl and Got Talent work because communal entertainment and the aspiration to achieve are deep-rooted social needs. It’s hard to envisage a world where top franchises like this ever disappear – though Simon Cowell might.

There are also neat devices for extending enjoyment of those compelling shows I referred to. PVRs and on-demand services, for example, are throwing a protective ring around great content. And the fact that shows can be endlessly repeated on digital means my kids can indulge their love of SpongeBob, The Simpsons and iCarly until mom kidnaps the control.

The big question for TV, however, is what this growth in mainstream gaming means in the long term. Is it a substantive threat to the medium – or can it be harnessed in some way to generate revenues?

Some TV players are trying to find out. Cartoon Network, for example, is trying to work out if its core character set has the kind of loyalty that can transfer to mass player online games. Sony Pictures Television, meanwhile, has rolled out its hit quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire to around 70 territories in the form of a mobile application. Discovery and the BBC are using gaming as a form of brand extension for their flagship factual series (for example, Life), while Endemol is developing a social gaming version of its hit format Deal or No Deal.

But all of this is about stuff that goes on away from the main TV set. As such, it’s like a sophisticated licensing play. In the same way content companies repackage their IP as toys, books and apparel, they’re trying to drive revenues through brand extensions.

More interesting is whether gaming can start to have a meaningful impact on the TV in the living room – and whether this will have a knock-on effect to the subsidiary sets that feed off that central digital hub.

In my view, there will be a few key consequences:

Firstly, there just has to be some channel consolidation – since there’s going to be a bunch of channels which nobody is watching. There are just too many games, social networks and specialist hobby-based websites to justify all of that dead TV.

Secondly, game mechanics will start to infect some of the dayparts outside primetime (particularly if the Wii or the Xbox become default set-top boxes in living rooms around the world). The fact that women are increasingly open to gaming, for example, suggests that daytime TV will see soft, low-cost gameplay become part of the scheduling mix alongside soaps, magazines and chat shows.

When mainstream audiences can seamlessly access online content through their TV sets, then the regulatory controls on gaming will fall away and it will be easy for daytime audiences to engage in formats that fuse the best of games, networking and good old TV. More interesting perhaps is what happens in access primetime.

Anecdotally, there are reports that Wii-based gaming is starting to replace early evening family viewing in Japan. As yet we haven’t seen such trend develop in the West – because it’s hard to get any kind of agreement within families on what constitutes communal entertainment. But it does seem to me that this slot is vulnerable to digital gaming. Traditionally, it’s when families played board games or cards – so it’s not hard to envisage screen-based versions of those games catching on. Alternatively, this could be the daypart where we see a move to mass-participation games based on TV concepts.

Of real interest was a recent linkup between Endemol and Xbox Live on an online-enabled version of the quiz format 1 vs 100. The exciting thing here was that the concept attracted 150,000 simultaneous avatar-based players. In other words, it demonstrated how gaming could, in theory, become appointment-to-view TV (as opposed to a solitary, backroom experience).

Now I’m not a massive 1 vs 100 fan – but I can see how this might help reconnect audiences with TV. Imagine switching on at 6 p.m. as a regular viewer, joining in a game and by 9 p.m. being a national star or born-again millionaire.

Before signing off it’s also worth asking what 3D might offer the TV space. After the massive success of James Cameron’s Avatar, could it be that 3D plus gaming could be the devices that help get people in front of the TV set on a more regular basis? Whether they do or not, it seems highly likely that the visual grammar of gaming is set to proliferate television.