The garden furniture showroom in Toronto’s design district has been transformed into a dim, moody nightclub to showcase the holiday offerings for Sony’s PS3 and PSP game boxes, but it’s a bit of a stag night, with scarcely more than three or four females in sight.

The raised platforms on either end of the room where Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero IV are being demoed have been colonized by enthusiastic young men fervently miming to Bon Jovi and Smashing Pumpkins tunes, while the white couches that fill the rest of the space are packed with members of the gaming press trying out new titles like Sony’s Resistance 2, Ubisoft’s Prince Of Persia and Electronic Arts’ Mirrors Edge.

“You can play the game without shooting a single person,” says Aaron Krause of EA, one of the biggest names in gaming and a third-party game developer for the Playstation platform. He’s showing off Mirrors Edge, patiently explaining terms like “first person shooter” for me, and enthusiastically describing the game, which is based on the urban sport of parkour, or “free running.” In a room filled with the sounds of gunfire and agonized screams, it’s unusual to find a game where you’re actually rewarded for not blowing holes in folks.

Garrett Young, a producer for Treyarch, was part of the team that developed 007: Quantum Of Solace for Activision, and he’s eagerly taking me through a level of the game where Daniel Craig’s Bond is clambering over the top of a high-speed train on its way to Montenegro to foil some smugglers and get his hands on an invite to a high-stakes poker game. “We wanted to make a great game first then wrap it in the world of Bond,” he tells me. The team worked on the game as the new Bond film was being made, working from a shooting script, photos and four visits to the set, and they’re expecting it to be a big seller this Christmas.

My gaming skills are sorely out of place at the event, however; sitting alone on a couch in front of a game called Little Big Planet, I manage to press a combination of buttons that turns the screen black and makes the controller go dead. I quietly put it down and slip away quietly.