You’ve forged a successful career writing about gaming culture for publications such as the New Yorker and New Statesman. What made you want to write a book?
The past few years I’ve been doing a fair bit of reporting about video games, and what particularly interests me are the human stories in and around them – both about the people playing them, who do interesting things, and those about the community built up around games. I just really wanted to formalise that into a book. I wanted to ask the question: why do people give so much of themselves to this medium in particular?

Video games generally get a bad reputation from the wider – non-playing – world, especially when compared with other forms of culture. Why is this?
I think it’s rooted in the idea of play. Play is viewed as something childish and childlike and something that you should move on from. But it’s slowly changing. Video games can very often be childish and dumb and the subject matter can be grotesque, but there’s also immense scope for other things you can experience within video games. Most people in their 30s and even early 40s these days grew up playing video games as just part of their entertainment diet, alongside literature, film, music and all the rest. I think that generational distrust is going to go away eventually.

Does the existence of “death by video game” – particularly prevalent in Asia – surprise you?
No, because if the right video game comes into the right person’s life at the right moment, it can provide them with all kinds of things that can lure them to spend their time in that game. They are a form of escape, but so is a bottle of red wine at the end of the evening; so is a Netflix series.

In the book, you talk about the launch of The Sims – why was it so significant?
The Sims is a game that was designed in the early 1990s by someone called Will Wright, who is interested in games that simulate discrete aspects of the real world. You’re given a virtual doll’s house and you create characters and influence their behaviour – they strike up relationships and romances and have children, get jobs and get depressed. During the development of the game, the team was debating whether or not they should allow same-sex relationships in the game – a very controversial matter at the time.

The game was shown off at the video game conference, E3, which happens every year in Los Angeles, and the version of the game that was shown didn’t have the programming code that forbade same-sex relationships. While the game was being demo’ed live to an audience of press, two of the characters – women – just happened to fall in love on screen and they kissed one another. None of this was scripted, it was just all happening live. It became the story of the event.

I wrote a story about it for the New Yorker a couple of years ago, and subsequently loads of people wrote in about how, when they were teenagers, and really wrestling with their own sexual identity, this game came into their lives and allowed them to explore their sexuality and helped them with what they were going through.

Why do you think video gaming seems to encourage more extreme behaviour than other art forms, such as the case of Kurt J Mac, who plans to spend decades walking to the edge of the online game Minecraft?
Kurt decided that he was going to walk in one direction, every day, according to his digital compass, until he reached this place where the world breaks up, which is known as the Far Lands. It’s a tremendously long way away, thousands and thousands of virtual kilometres. He started a YouTube channel called Far Lands or Bust [371,811 subscribers], which is just him playing the game while talking about what’s going on in his life, current affairs and what’s going on in the landscape. It sounds very novel, but really this endeavour is a cousin of the explorers of the past hundreds of years, such as the Elizabethans who would go out to find new lands and then report back on what they were seeing. That’s almost impossible to do on our planet now because Google satellites map every inch of terrain.

You mention the misogynistic controversy of Gamergate in the book – does the gaming industry have the capacity for progress in gender and racial equality?
Absolutely. There’s a researcher in Spain who is working with virtual reality at the moment. He’s done a few tests whereby he makes white people feel as if they are inhabiting the body of a person of colour, and has other characters in the virtual world hurling racial abuse at them. They found that people who go through this come out of the game with a new understanding of what it is to be the subject of racial abuse. So I think the ability that video games have to allow us to inhabit another person or another position in life, or another race or gender, is hugely powerful, and something that we’ve only just started to explore.

What are your favourite types of games and why?
I enjoy games across the full spectrum. A game such as Tetris – the block-tidying game designed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union – is almost perfect. It’s a sport-like game, but with such tremendous beauty and elegance.

You’re a father. Do you have concerns about your kids gaming?
My eldest is 10 and then I’ve got a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. The middle child is really into games – he will get up in the morning and if I let him we will just play games until he gets hungry and can’t play any more. The other two are not that interested. So, I think to blanket distrust video games is the wrong approach – there is often something educational or enriching in them. It’s something to educate yourself about, to embrace, and to be smart with.