Why I game

By day, I’m a mild-mannered book-world hanger-on; by night, I roar through the streets of Gotham in my heavily armed Batmobile, soar above it on the outstretched wings of my cape, and swoop down to bash multiple armed thugs into unconsciousness with a crunching series of ‘Fear Takedowns’. No, I know. When you write it down like that, my enthusiasm for Batman: Arkham Knight doesn’t sound very grown-up at all. (Never mind that I was first tipped off to the games in this series by the now deputy leader of the Labour party.)

As the Spectator’s literary editor, I probably ought to cultivate an image of high-minded devotion to the written word — give out that I spend my evenings on avant-garde fiction or literary biographies. And I do spend a good deal of time on that stuff. But when I want to zone out once the kids are in bed, I’ll like as not boot up my PC and get stuck into some daft videogame.

I have been, on and off, addicted to video-games since my earliest years playing Defender and other less sophisticated games on a BBC B micro. I have spent countless hours playing David Braben’s amazing space trading game Elite, months immersed in the Azeroth of World of Warcraft or the Nilfgaard of Witcher 3, and God knows how long with Candy Crush on my commute. I say this without a flicker of shame.

The first and most general mistake that every half-informed critic of videogames makes is to imagine that this vast umbrella term indicates any particular thing at all: to imagine that they’re violent, or childish, or don’t tell stories, or only tell stories, that they’re isolating, or that they’re communal, that they’re competitive or that they’re pointless, that they’re difficult or that they require no skill.