Have you heard of Game Group? No, me neither. But I wish I’d bought shares in it, because amid the noise of blue chips going bust, this Basingstoke-based company expects first-half profits of over £33m.

It’s a video-game retailer, Europe’s largest, selling titles such as Grand Theft Auto and Guitar Hero. It’s not alone in bucking the trend: Nintendo is now Japan’s second most valuable company.

The rise of gaming is often underappreciated. Far from being confined to bloodthirsty adolescents’ bedrooms, it is now massive across the board, and the games are getting more sophisticated by the day. Nintendo’s Wii Fit appeals to health-conscious young women; Nintendogs, a game that allows players to raise a cute virtual puppy, appeals to young girls; and mental arithmetic games such as Brain Training have become a staple of retirement homes.

Pretty soon there will even be games that tell you what you are thinking, even if you don’t know it. Hang on, there is one already, and you can try it here: http://backhand.uchicago.edu/ Center/ShooterEffect .

It was devised by psychologists at the University of Chicago in the wake of a police shooting in New York in 1999. Four plainclothes officers had been searching the Bronx for a rape suspect when they saw Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old west African immigrant, standing by his apartment block. They ordered him not to move, but he appeared to reach for something in his pocket. They fired 41 shots, 19 of which hit and killed him. He was unarmed, but all four officers were acquitted. The court ruled that they couldn’t have known he wasn’t going for a gun.

The Chicago researchers wondered whether Diallo might have fared better if he hadn’t been black. So they devised a game where volunteers were shown 100 images of people holding guns, wallets or phones. Half are white, half are black, and the game measures your reaction time before either shooting or not shooting them.

I shot the black gunmen in an average of 690 milliseconds and the white ones in 746ms. This means I am racist. Worse still, I reprieved the unarmed white men quicker (722ms) than the unarmed black ones (812ms).

I e-mailed the game to some other apparently unprejudiced people in the office. Same result. One seemingly harmless girl who did badly is still traumatised by the sudden realisation that her organic, free-range, Amnesty International-card-carrying lifestyle appears to be a front for subliminal BNP-style prejudice.

I got an Indian friend to have a go. Blew away all the black gunmen double-quick. Ditto a white South African friend. You know what they’re like. But ditto a black South African friend too. Lightning reactions.

So are we all racist? Given their findings and mine, the answer is almost certainly yes.

In presidential election year, the game and others like it have been doing the rounds in American cyberspace. Lots of liberals are freaking out at the results. Shooting black people in computer games has wider implications. Could subliminal prejudice influence some voters and therefore the election and the future of global politics? Could Barack Obama lose for the same reasons Diallo did?

Probably not. All I know is that I need to practise the game more.

Soon I hope to be able to shoot white guys just as quickly as black guys.

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