In response to Simon Kirrane's recent article, 'This is your wake up call', we offer appeasement: 'It's all right, you can go back to sleep now'.
Jon Palmer

Unless you've just stumbled across Future Gamer on some wayward netsurfing expedition, you're a computer gamer. You like computer games, you play them and you'll sometimes have to justify to others the whiling away of your youth in pursuits that have no 'meaning'.

And, as a Future Gamer reader, you'll have read an article here last week, written by my good friend and colleague Simon Kirrane, arguing that videogames are a complete and utter waste of time and of absolutely no benefit to you or anybody else. You'll have raved against this argument as, "Old age should burn and rave at close of day," or you may have been swayed by my colleague's eloquence and abandoned your whimpering console on the porch of the nearest charity shop, wrapped in swaddling clothes. You fool! For Simon was wrong - horribly, horribly wrong.

He has misled you. Computer games are all right. They may even be 'worthwhile' - at least in the sense that anything in our end-of-the-world-as-we know-it society can be considered worthwhile - but we won't fall despairingly into the black chasm of nihilism because that isn't worthwhile.

"Do not go gentle into that good night." Of course, even had Dylan Thomas not been far too pissed up on booze to manage even a simple game of Mario, he could not have played videogames anyway as he died in 1953. But his words, and those of other poets, still have relevance for us here as they are about the predicament of life, and videogames are part of our lives, whether we like it or not.

So: "Say not the struggle naught availeth/The labour and the wounds are vain/The enemy faints not, nor faileth/As as things have been they remain," said Arthur Hugh Clough, whose own struggle faileth him in 1861.