Video games can teach us more about philosophy than books – if only they’d dare

Genuine moral dilemmas are frustratingly rare in gaming – change that, and we could learn more about ourselves than any book might teach us

I am at a fortunate stage of my parenting journey where I have a son old enough to have a girlfriend smart enough to give genuinely thoughtful gifts to her boyfriend’s dad at Christmas. This is how I came to unwrap Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us (About Life, Philosophy and Everything) by Jordan Erica Webber and Daniel Griliopoulos. Books are a risky thing to give as gifts because they, like video games, require an investment of time. You don’t throw them on calloused feet like a sock or slap them about your tired face like an aftershave. Or vice versa depending on the smell of your feet or coldness of your face.

I find academic books about video games personally ironic because in the 90s I wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 show called Are Books Dead? where I argued that video games had made the written word redundant. This was obviously a stupid question, but this was the decade of making loud statements without requiring intelligence to back them up, just one of the reasons it was such a glorious time to be alive, and why Liam Gallagher was its hero.