Friends, on the day this column is first published, I turn 34 years of age. Yes, thanks.

Now, while I feel pretty creaky, and I just don’t understand this modern “nu-metal” music – it’s all just shouting and you can’t hear the words – that doesn’t in any conventional sense count as middle-aged. Except, that is, if you play videogames. Because in videogames, middle age is the entire period between the ages of nine and 45, and if it’s all the same to everyone, I think I’d like to progress to being a crotchety old pensioner as soon as possible, please. Pull up a Werther’s Original and I’ll tell you why.

Like most aspects of our culture these days, videogaming is increasingly subject to the attack of infantilism. Now, that might seem like a pretty strange accusation for a videogamer to make – hey, by playing games at all, aren’t we just kids anyway? – but even by the rather developmentally-retarded standards of video games, we’re undergoing a regression. 

What I mean by that is that the games business, like other leisure businesses, has wised up to the fact that the last person they want to be making games for is the intelligent, discerning consumer. After all, by definition, the discerning consumer is harder to please and less likely to put up with half-baked, rush-released, insultingly, cynically dreadful games like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

But we live in a world where, somehow, the demands of whiny pre-teen children have become society’s primary obsession – and you only have to look at the pop charts to see the truth of that – and therefore the prime economic force operating on our culture is that of “pester power” (the snappy name they give to the fact that today’s weak-willed parents will buy anything, from bad videogames to hundred-quid trainers, if it’ll stop their spoilt kids from pouting for five minutes. I dunno, if I’d demanded hundred-quid trainers when I was little I’d have got a smack in the head and sent to bed with no supper. Tchah). 

But in case you think I’m just a grumpy old man who hates kids - I hate the middle-aged, too. Read on.

Because the other thing that makes me want to be a videogaming pensioner is the fact that the gamers my age are even more depressing than the kids. It’s one thing to see kids obsessively hoovering up endless identically-crap WWF games or shabby cartoon platformers. They’re kids, they’re stupid, they don’t know any better, they have an excuse. But the same “grown-up” gamers who sneer at the kids for buying those games, what are they doing? I’ll tell you what they’re doing – they’re queueing up outside games shops so they can be the first person to buy Gran Turismo 3 or the Championship Manager.

The latest game in the Championship Manager series (well, it’s not even the latest game, it’s just a wildly overpriced data-update disc) has just become the fastest-selling PC game of all time, and I can’t tell you how desperately that makes me want to shoot myself. Because “grown-up” gamers are such horrifically insecure people that the idea of playing games at all embarrasses them to the core of their dead grey souls. Therefore, the only games they buy are those which attempt to simulate reality in such minute, trainspotting detail that they can pretend they’re not playing a game at all, but are in fact training as a test pilot or racing driver or some other glamorous profession that they’re too scared or lazy or useless to attempt to master for real.

If there’s anything sadder in gaming than someone who thinks they know what it really feels like to be at the controls of a superpowered racing car because they’ve mastered Laguna Seca in a Ferrari or Nissan Skyline in F355 Challenge or GT3, then I’ve yet to encounter it. Racing (or football) is entirely about the life-threatening adrenalin rush that you can’t replicate with any amount of maths, no matter how “correctly” you recreate the wheel-balance on a Dodge Viper or identify how many hairs Rio Ferdinand has up his nose.

Grumpy old people don’t care what anyone thinks, though. (You only have to look at the way they dress to see that.) So roll on the day when I can be a videogame pensioner and get away from all these bratty kids and tedious anoraks. I hope it won’t be too many more birthdays away.