The player

JOE GRIFFINand CIARA O'BRIENon how they came to love gaming

One of my earliest memories is, at the age of five, playing Activision Tennis on a neighbour’s Atari 2600. Similar recollections pepper my upbringing; forgetting to pack for a summer holiday because I was too busy playing Tetris (aged 10); buying a coveted Commodore 64 with my Confirmation money (13); playing Super Mario games for money against my brother (14); listening to Nirvana while playing platform games on my Super Nintendo (17); discovering hip-hop and Sony’s PlayStation at roughly the same time (18).

Gaming is so ubiquitous that you barely notice it. If you’re reading this at work, there might well be a colleague playing solitaire on a nearby computer. If you’re on public transport, a nearby passenger is probably playing a game on their phone. You or a friend might have dipped into Scrabble on Facebook at some stage. Maybe you’re fidgeting with a new game app on your iPhone, or perhaps you’re a more committed gamer on your console or PC.

Like television in its early years, videogames have been the subject of hysterical hand-wringing across the media. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that games were collectively responsible for low school grades, childhood obesity, violence and grand theft auto.

Sensationalist headlines tend to focus on violent, adult-aimed titles such as Manhunt, but overlook Flower (in which you gently nudge flower petals along a breeze), health games (Brain Training, Wii Fit), instructive flight simulation games, or educational world-building classics such as Civilisation. Society has survived The Sex Pistols, Natural Born Killers and Jedward, so we can probably survive videogames.

If this collective love of gaming makes us better people, that’s just dandy. If it’s an evil pastime that brings us closer to Gomorrah, well, at least we can skip there together. yyy