Hello, viewers!

This month, for a bit of a change, we're going to talk about you.

Won't that be fun? 

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You see, occasionally it gets a bit exasperating reading your letters.

Like some idiot going "How dare that Campbell claim that his PC has crashed 25 times when mine has worked for three hundred years non-stop?", say.

Or "I'm glad to see that Campbell has turned his back on the PC and returned to the Amiga", in direct contradiction of all the available evidence.

And it makes us columnists wonder this:

Just who are you lot, exactly?

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It's lucky, then, that the trade newspaper CTW (whose name you might have heard in these pages before) has this month conducted a massive survey into the nature of the games-playing public at large.

Made in conjunction with most of the major mag publishers, CTW's 56-page comprehensive survey reveals more about gamers and their lives than has ever previously been known to the industry.

Permit me to share with you now, a few of the surprises in store.

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For example, Playstation gamers and PC owners alike quoted their favourite game genre as "strategy", presumably in an attempt to appear intellectual, although no-one knows what the heck a "strategy" game actually is.

(After all, don't all games require you to use "strategy"?)

Quite how this explains the charts, where any PS No.1 that isn't a driving game or a beat-'em-up triggers an immediate police enquiry, is a mystery currently defying expert explanation.

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Moving on, the Saturn market throws up its fair share of shocks, too.

For example, a stunning 81% of Saturn owners still appear to believe their machine has a "strong future", with 86% of those believing the machine will last "at least three more years" as a viable format.

This, of course, is despite Sega themselves having recently admitted that they were all but abandoning the platform. The survey predicts less than 35,000 Saturn sales this year.

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The survey also studies social issues, and revealed, via AF and CU Amiga, the perhaps not-all-that-surprising fact that almost 68% of all Amiga owners have never had a girlfriend. Ever.

This is, of course, doubly ironic, because "Amiga" is actually the Spanish word for "girlfriend".

One can only imagine that the original management of Commodore were playing a funny practical joke on all the people who would buy their computer. So very little change there, then.

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Unsurprisingly, there is least data on N64 owners. However, the available facts indicate that the average N64 user is aged between 11 and 14.

However, when asked, the same people claimed that they intended to spend more money on games over a year than any other sort of gamer (a hefty £588).

This would appear to suggest that most N64 owners are spoilt little rich kids, whose mummy and daddy will buy them practically anything they ask for, in order to stop them crying and sulking.

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The funniest thing revealed by the survey was that only 17% of PC gamers actually owned their own PC, with the rest playing all their games on office machines. (For net-surfing, the figures saw just 8% using their own computers).

From this, there is very little option other than to conclude that PC owners are in fact all appalling hypocrites, loudly proclaiming the virtues of their stupid, horrible, expensive machines to the rest of the world, but lacking the will to actually put their money where their mouths are and buy one.

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Now obviously, the previous pages are just a selective snippet of the huge dossier of information contained in the survey, which I have just made up and which runs to dozens more pages.

Still, I think that the survey, and the reaction to it, tell us more about today's gamer than ever before.