Playing on the right side of the rabbit hole

Ann Donald: About 15 years ago I bought my first Apple Mac, which came with the computer game Myst installed on the hard drive

In what turned out to be my first and only experience of computer games so far, I sat rapt for 10 hours straight, lost in the alternative game-world. When finally I looked up blinking, I realised I had completely ignored my family for an entire day. I was shocked at myself, and swore I'd never play the game again. Somehow, it never occurred to me that losing myself in a computer game for hours on end was not much different from doing so in a book. But then I am of the generation that understands computer games are Bad and books are Good.

Since then, I've only paid peripheral attention to the existence of the digitised worlds that exist in parallel to our own, and looked with bafflement at teenage boys who seem to consider them as more real than the real one. One part of me is aware that Grand Theft Auto is Bad (teenagers watch lots of people die, I think), and that Sim City is Good (teenagers learn about town planning, or something).

Even more baffling are those supposedly sane, allegedly intelligent and apparently mature friends of mine on Facebook who play farm-farm or spend inordinate amounts of their time filling in tests to find out which celebrity they are.

Now, however, I read that rather than dismissing the gaming world as irrelevant, I should recognise that "games are the 21st century's most serious business", and that they are changing the world we know more intrinsically than the planes flying into the World Trade Center could ever have hoped to do.

In his book Fun Inc., Tom Chatfield charts the development of our love of games from as far back at 2600BC, to the emergence of the computer gaming industry in the early 1960s to today.

He writes about the psychological, philosophical, scientific, technical and economic imperatives that have conspired to attract more than 350-million game players across the globe.

But what made me reconsider my view that these games were mere distractions for people who didn't understand that books were infinitely superior, was Chatfield's own conversion: "Video games, I began to realise, were much more than mere toys: they were a way of exploring, and attempting to create, whole other worlds," he wrote.

Now, to any book lover, as you all know, that is what books do; it's why we love reading. Thinking back to Myst, I realise that that was exactly what enthralled me for those 10 hours back in 1995. It was like falling through the rabbit hole and finding myself in another world unlike anything I'd experienced before. Even more exciting was that I got to participate in the story - I chose which door to open, which character to track, which clue to follow. It was fun, and it scared me to think how easily I could get addicted to it.

This is a fear that social pundits repeatedly warn us about - that we're breeding generations of youngsters who are incapable of living without an electronic limb in the form of a cellphone, an iPod or a computer. What's more, they don't need to. This is the future, Chatfield advises calmly, and the game instinct - intrinsically part of our genetic structure - is leading the way in "inter-connecting" human life with digital applications in ways people like me can't even imagine.

I shiver at the thought. But then I consider the rabbit hole, and realise it's in anticipation, not fear.