Play enough sandbox games and it’s easy to conclude the genre is inherently flawed. The freedom such games give you is often a  simultaneous blessing and curse. In theory, the removal of hidden boundaries should make the gaming experience more realistic. In practice, the freedom often panders to the gamer’s worst...

n.b. certain names have been changed. In retrospect I probably should have changed my own, too. THE stresses and strains at my new school had been quite different to those I had experienced in the state system. There were the teachers: furious, ex-military men who seemed to have marched straight off the set of Where Eagles Dare, and who...

My story starts in the late 1980s, in a tiny prep school in Paignton, Devon. I am a nine-year-old child, and I’m sitting in the front row of the class. Next to me is a girl called Heather. Heather is the prettiest and cleverest girl there. She’s pulled off the near-impossible trick of making both her teachers and her classmates like...

My name is Alan White, and I’m a relatively normal young man who lives in London and works as a freelance journalist. I say I’m relatively normal. I have a girlfriend and a few friends, and I like most sports and films, and books, and dinner in good restaurants, and walks in the park. But I also like video games. No – I love video...