Time-consuming video games are not a modern phenomenon and nor is the panic around them. The idea of video games as a pointless timesink goes back to the arcades, where the classic cabinets of their time – Centipede, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids – were explicitly designed to tempt players to feed them just one more coin. The game design of this era proved ludicrously and almost universally compelling, and not just for bored children. Plenty of adults lost hours and pocketfuls of change to Pong or Space Invaders in pubs, pizza joints and late-night cafés.

Arcades were portrayed as dens of iniquity by newspapers, by pastors and memorably by a US surgeon general, who declared that young Americans were addicted “body and soul” to the dubious pleasures of games. They were places where youths gathered to enjoy a new entertainment, which, to their parents’ generation, seemed mysterious and dangerous.

Even those who enjoyed early video games often seemed to do so with a certain sense of shame. A young(ish) Mr Martin Amis, who, in 1982, published an unlikely guide to arcade games entitled Invasion Of The Space Invaders, painted video games as equally fascinating and distasteful, rhapsodising over games such as Defender while continually comparing their pleasures to pornography, “no worse than any other form of selfish and pointless gratification”. “What we are dealing with is a global addiction,” he wrote. “I mean, this might all turn out to be a bit of a problem. Let me adduce my own symptoms, withdrawals, dryouts, crack-ups, benders…”

This thinly veiled parallel between video games and drugs resurfaced in the media when the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its list of mental health conditions in 2018. The term describes a gaming compulsion that significantly affects other areas of a person’s life and, although it is understood to affect less than one per cent of people who play games (and tends to co-occur with serious mental health issues such as severe depression or substance abuse), the word “addiction” is thrown around casually when it comes to video games, used to describe everything from a daily Wordle routine to tweens who play a bit too much Fortnite.

Despite the increasing creative and technological sophistication of video games – and their increasing ubiquity, as they moved from arcades into living rooms and then into our pockets, first on Game Boys and now on phones – this nebulous attitude that they are somehow at best a waste of time and at worst nefarious still sometimes persists. I am reminded of the uncharitable radio interviewer who once asked me, after a terse interview about Grand Theft Auto V, why I didn’t just go and read a book, as if the two were mutually exclusive. At weddings and friends’ birthday parties, when I tell people I’m a video games journalist, I am treated to confessions of 10-year Skyrim “habits” from grown adults who seem almost thrilled to share their secret.

I think this is tied into the misguided late-capitalist idea that, unless you are being productive, your time is being wasted. It is fully time to let go of the idea that any time spent enjoying yourself is time taken away from some more worthwhile pursuit. It would be self-evidently absurd to say the same about sport, or reading.

These days, video games are more widely understood and accepted as beneficial for mental health. An Oxford University study in 2020 found that people who spent significant time playing Animal Crossing reported greater wellbeing, which will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who plays games, because games are fun and interesting, and fun, interesting things generally make us feel good. Online games, meanwhile, provide a safe and fun space for us to socialise and enjoy ourselves with friends (and sometimes make connections with strangers), something that has been vital over the past two years.

As well as being enjoyable, though, in my experience – and that of the hundreds of people I’ve spoken to and reported on over the years – video games can also be deeply meaningful. They can teach us things about ourselves or other people. Games can be autobiographical, giving us an insight into the designer’s experiences. Through placing us in the shoes of a character in a way that film and TV cannot, they can foster empathy. They can challenge us in interesting ways, letting us know, in some small ways, that we can do things we never thought we could. (Think of all the times you’ve been on the brink of giving up on a boss fight or a puzzle, only to pull through and feel a sense of pure elation.)

Mr Todd Howard, the creative director behind the famously enthralling Elder Scrolls fantasy games, told me that this sense of meaning is the whole point of games, for him. “That’s one of the things people who don’t play a lot of games never quite understand,” he says. “When you play a game and you accomplish something, that’s real. It’s a real accomplishment in your life, or it has been to me and to other people I meet who love gaming. You can finish the week and say, ‘I saved the world,’ and you legit feel that way. That’s the magic.”

It’s certainly more worthwhile than doomscrolling pointlessly on Twitter.