War games do something seriously unpleasant to our brains

Three years ago, I killed several thousand people over the course of a single weekend. Late into the night, I ran around butchering everyone I saw, until by the end I didn’t even feel anything any more. Just methodically powering through it all, through the wet sounds of splattering heads, bodies crumpling, shiny slicks of blood. I thought I was past caring. But when I finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep, and in my dreams I was haunted by all the men I’d killed. I saw their brains exploding, again and again and again.

In my defence, I’d had a bad week. It was December: a grotty English winter, not particularly cold but still utterly grim. The kind of winter that seems to stick to everything, like a layer of congealed grease. I was worried about money. My political party had just been utterly humiliated in a general election. I was feeling down. So I cancelled all my plans that weekend and decided to spend two days playing video games.

This isn’t something I usually do: the last time I’d devoted this many waking hours to gaming was as a student, when I’d smoke too much weed and forget which knob on the controller was which, with the result that my character would walk around snapping his head up and down in an alarming and nausea-inducing fashion, firing in random panic, usually at my own team mates, until I either wandered obliviously off a cliff or someone got bored of the whole sad spectacle and grabbed the controller out my hands. I am not good at these things, which is why I generally avoid them. But my flatmate had a PS4 and there was nothing I wanted to do except wallow in my own misery for a while, so I did.