Brian Baglow has worked on games such as Grand Theft Auto and Body Harvest and now promotes companies involved in the interactive, mobile,  wow gold Store online and entertainment industries through the PR agency he founded called Indoctrimat.

He estimates that between 50 and 60m people are involved in virtual world gaming.

He said: "There are as many different types [of virtual game] as you can think of different movies or television and surprisingly it started back at the beginning of computing, when computers were all fundamentally linked together.

"You didn't have your very smart PC on your desktop but they were all in universities and they had huge fire-proofed rooms with something the size of a house in there and all you had eve isk was the keyboard and the television screen and some of the early games actually turned into multi-player worlds.

"If you want some of the jargon, they're called MMORPGs - Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games."

Mr Baglow believes the attraction of the games could be the bond formed between players.

"It's the ability to interact with other people - real people all over the planet regardless of where they are or who they are," he said.