"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very Heaven!" as William Wordsworth (who, by the way, has been pushing up the daffs since 1850) had it, but the occasional game of this or that is relaxing and enjoyable. If you have a glass of wine with your dinner, you'll be fine; if you drink a couple of bottles with your slice of cold pizza you're going to get ill. If you sit around all the time watching TV and playing with yourself, you're going to get stupid and fat. If you play videogames all the time, your insides are going to turn to grey mush and your eyes are going to explode. Even 'noble' pursuits, like reading poetry all the time, are bad for you, but if you do these things in moderation, you won't do yourself or anybody else any lasting damage.

Going for Gold
There's even a move now to make videogames a recognised Olympic sport. That, in my opinion, is going too far, but there was a bloke on the telly recently being interviewed on the subject. Admittedly, it was at 6.30 on a Saturday morning and, admittedly, the poor man didn't have a decent argument beyond, "Chess is recognised, snooker is recognised, why can't videogames be recognised?" but it made food for thought. And I thought, "What am I doing up at this time of day? Why am I watching telly? What's for breakfast? And I wonder if, armed with the clarity of mind that only fresh dawn can bring, I can get through the final stages of that excruciating level?"

We must constantly strive for new experience and videogames can give us this. "She's into new sensations/New kicks and the candlelight/She's like a new addiction/For every day and night," sings Ricky Martin, a trendy and contemporary speaker for our fin-de-millenium generation, and the boy who has everything. He's young, good-looking, he can sing and dance, and he's had a Number One hit record. But could he beat me at Actua Soccer (best of three)? Could he bollocks! And therein lies the rub.