Few topics have agitated great minds as persistently as the flaws of youth. Inter-generational hand-wringing has long been a ritualised passageway to middle age and beyond. The accelerated pace of technological and media change, however, has expanded the old habit to enthusiastically target youthful cultural forms as well as youthful people. Older, wiser souls at one time or another have pinioned cinema, be-bop, rock ‘n’ roll, comic books and rap music, amongst others, as the folly of youth.

These debates are well chronicled. Some are even enshrined in works of popular entertainment, as in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, a morbid and satirical account of silent cinema versus the talkies. It is now expected that those who have grown up attached to one set of cultural forms will expostulate as best they can in response to the media nouveau. And so it is with videogames. Despite their centrality and importance in today’s cultural life, videogames are routinely treated with disinterest and occasional hostility by cultural commentators who should know better. Bemusement and righteous ignorance are simply the most uninteresting and unchallenging responses to the emergence of a new media form we can have.