Why oh why did you say yes to that last shandy? The kebab seemed like a good idea, but your mouth now looks like the inside lining of Phil Jupiter’s boxer shorts. And to top it off, you’re trapped in a lava-filled dungeon and some bastard has kidnapped your princess. Where did your life go so horribly wrong?

I have news for you, it’s much, much worse. It’s not that you have a hangover playing Super Mario Brothers, it’s that you spend your life “working” on a computer located in a sterile office surrounded by drones. Your only escape? A drunken session on Friday night in Clapham, tonsil tennis with a rather suspicious femme fatale and bouncing around 8-bit levels smashing Goombas skulls with your huge pudgy Italian plumber girth the next morning (she didn’t come to house with you)

Computer games started out as something completely innocent. I remember that my cousins ​​had a version of Pong that, despite being a real nightmare to connect to TV, was very funny for ten minutes. Bouncing the ball with the paddles was not Wimbledon. What it was, was the 8-bit version of the prestigious AELTC tournament, which was one of the first games I played on the Master System. I still love the game to this day, with the added career mode I can’t help but feel like I’m right there on center court. Especially since he couldn’t play tennis because of toffee.

These days, games like the Grand Theft Auto and Halo franchises take escapism to whole new levels, allowing you to explore entire cities and indulge your wildest fantasies while channeling hordes of bad guys. There’s a magazine on my desk right now emblazoned with the word “hero,” if only. And while escapism is almost at its absolute peak (except for virtual reality), it started in the ’80s and made as much of an impact as it does now.

Adult life, fundamentally, has not changed much in the last thirty years. Despite numerous advances in technology, supposedly to make life easier, for most of us it’s the usual 9 to 5 schedule. Slaving away to line someone else’s pockets only to come home at a completely ungodly hour exhausted. Eat your dinner, turn on the TV, sleep, repeat. Rather crudely, I hypothesize that life requires five different needs: achievement; relaxation; emulation; competition and belonging. Right now, sitting here in a nondescript office, I feel tense, bored, lonely, and like this is just another day to kill on a road that seems to lead nowhere. No need is being met, I want to be at home playing video games.

The achievement is the easy one. Those who are successful in life and feel that they are living a good life can look back on a number of achievements. Whether it’s continuous progression through the ranks at work, raising children, or jumping out of a plane, nothing beats the feeling of accomplishment. For those hungry for such events, video games offer an easy alternative, and their impact is almost immediate. Going back to early arcade games like Pac-Man and Asteroids, you are instantly rewarded with level progression and score accumulation (sometimes reaching the notorious leader board). Home entertainment systems like the ZX Spectrum brought games like Manic Miner to the fore. This increase raises the other point that these needs not only relate to adult life but also to children. For growing children, a sense of accomplishment can be gained by doing well in school, doing well in PE, being praised for good attendance, etc. How often will this really happen? Sometimes in elementary school, he felt a greater sense of accomplishment after beating a few levels of Sonic than anything he had done during the day. With the xbox360 console, Microsoft brought the “Achievement” point system based on unlocking hidden secrets or even just completing levels. Why did they do this? We all love rewards, even more so when they’re obvious. As unnecessary as this development was, it adds another level of achievement to the already subtle one.

This brings me to the next “need”: relaxation. Or should I say, Relaxation through detachment. There’s no point in going home to play a computer game where the protagonist is a Customer Service advisor who has to answer phones and emails all day. They say that at lunchtime it is advisable to have lunch outside the office, so that the mind can be distracted and relax accordingly. Video games work on the same principle that they can take you out of work, out of your home life and into something much more wonderful. The aforementioned Super Mario Bros is a great example. I think it’s the first true example of an ethereal world where you can explore and unlock hidden rewards at your leisure. Earlier consoles and computers had games that contained hidden levels, but the graphics and memory available before 1985 struggled to do anything on this scale. Throw in a hero story where you have to rescue a princess and you have the whole package. I could talk about detachment all day, but the result is that video games take you to another world at the push of a button, where you can easily forget what your life is really about.

As I mentioned earlier, I was very bad at tennis as a child. Someone who wasn’t bad at tennis was Stefan Edberg. Although Wimbledon on MS was licensed, it did not contain the actual names of the players. But my word, one of the characters looked like the Swedish master himself. When you’re growing up, role models are important. That seems like a pretty obvious thing, but how many children lack the right role models in everyday life? We admire people and want to emulate them. We see them achieve great things and we want to achieve them ourselves. When we can’t do something, video games (especially sports titles) are an easy way to emulate our heroes. I played World Cup Italia 90 on the Mega Drive a lot more than I should have simply because it was the only way to recreate the tournament available to me. The emulation even comes down to wanting to be said Italian plumber hero (one was also pretty useless with the ladies) or a spiky blue hedgehog thwarting an evil genius.

Emulation follows competition. There is nothing like winning a game. All that coding and you’ve still beaten the CPU. Have that Edberg. It’s also great to show that you’re the best at something, that you’re better than your peers. At work I have few colleagues simply because of the mediocrity of my work. Do I want to be better than them? The feeling is barely tangible. Competition is good for the human spirit. Constantly being challenged is the way people improve, and successful people thrive because of it. The rewards are sometimes obvious, a big trophy, a big raise, but sometimes they’re not. Video games offer competition at all levels. Beat the CPU, beat your friends, beat the world. Video games offer a challenge when life falls on its back. Do you want an arena to show that you are better than your peers? Hosted a Days of Thunder competition on the NES (not everyone was impressed…). Multiplayer games have been around in abundance since the days of Pong and now video game tournaments have become a multi-billion dollar industry of their own.

That brings me to my final point: belonging. Sega or Nintendo? If you’re into retro gaming, that one question alone is probably stirring something inside of you. Why? Because choosing a console isn’t just about choosing a machine to play with, it’s about choosing a gang, a way of life that must be better than its counterpart. Both children and adults feel segregation on a daily basis. I was lucky in school as I had good friends who I still socialize with to this day. Others were not so lucky. When you enter the professional world, it is natural that you want to work for a company to which you belong. In your personal life, it’s natural to want to live somewhere in a house with the people you love and where you feel like you belong. Even before online gaming with its vast communities and friendship existed, just saying on the playground if you were a Mega Drive or SNES guy started a positive conversation about Sonic or Mario alike. It wasn’t just consoles, it was who you were.

As much as a vacation satisfies your relaxation needs or going to a football game satisfies your need to belong, there is nothing quite like video games to provide the complete package after a long day on the coalface.