From the Editor: Tuesday 31st January

Plonking down in front of my Playstation 4 is an incredibly fun and immersive experience I’d like to extol. Some might find it odd that I’m a music/opera/book lover who’s also into gaming but I find cultural snobbery irksome anyway. Ranking pleasures has always been problematic: just look up Bentham’s felicific calculus if you want an example. Gaming fans might even roll their eyes at my alluding to it being looked down on anyway: it’s a multi-billion pound industry with countless millions of players across the world.

I bought my PS4 in late September and have played some sensational games since then. Firewatch is what’s known as a “walking sim” where you wander around a beautifully rendered, unrealistically vibrantly coloured forest as a fire warden and select dialogue options. The game is noteworthy for the strength of its writing and voice cast. You play from a first person perspective as Henry (whose wife has become ill), as he struggles with his marriage and identity and takes a break with an isolated job. He converses with his boss Delilah via walkie talkie: they flirt, bicker, discuss strange events, and also just pass the time with idle chit-chat and observations.

It’s an enthralling story with some mystery elements that takes about six hours or so to play through, and I got it for about £9. On the other end of the scale, I loved Final Fantasy XV for its swashbuckling combat and a stunning mystical world to explore. It cost me £38 but happily ate up about 45 hours of my spare time. Gaming is a very cheap, startlingly entertaining art form, and will be the dominant cultural medium of the 21st century, as film was for the 20th century.

Are you a gamer? Do you think it’s just twaddle for kids or do you agree with me that it’s one of the most thrilling, developing, protean art form around at the moment?

Joe Fuller
editorial@thelatest.co.uk