Gaming isn’t art, whatever fans might say

I was hooked once too. I also used to gun down civilians, do battle with the LAPD and win the Premier League before I’d even had my breakfast, a small pyjamed boy sat breathless in the front room, smarting behind the eyes from three hours of close-range televisual retina damage. I knew it was killing me and robbing me of my youth – which is not even to mention the drain it was on my one-pound-a-week pocket money – but I couldn’t stop. The power of my addiction to video gaming was too strong.

I dabbled in most things, but what really did it for me was a street drug named Nightfire, a first-person shooter game that allowed me to become a pixelated James Bond for as long as the disk whirred inside my Playstation 2. There wasn’t much to it and the game mostly consisted of a slaughter of anonymous henchmen selected to die for the user’s satisfaction, but Nightfire was the greatest thrill of mine and my friends’ pre-teen lives.