"With games on the brain we sat in the pub, chatting, laughing, drinking bottled beer that we couldn’t really afford. That was okay - all money is relative. Then one of the party leaned in to me and says ‘I don’t really think of Warcraft as a game anymore, I think of it as a place.’ Since then I’ve been boiling thoughts, simmering theses on the coals of conjecture – just what would drive a man to say such a thing? Why can’t we dissolve discussion with a well placed ‘it’s only a game’?

It’s like this: we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore. This thing has gone too far. And the changes are no longer confined to a few fringe men, this is a shift in consciousness, one that we’re all sharing.

These big changes happen without you really noticing. Television, cinema, the car, cellphones – these things all had profound changes on the way we thought about the world. We mix up our own imagination with that of cinematographers – people didn’t have filmic dreams before TV and cinema, they didn’t have driving dreams before the car. Now these things are ubiquitous, they impinge on everything from the way we sleep to the metaphors we use. Did we notice? Did we even have a choice? These days we can barely imagine what that primitive state before the screen must have been like."

Jim, on fire. This is what we do this thing for.