After the horrible tragedy of September 11, it didn’t take long for videogames to come into the firing line again.

Within minutes, newspapers were blaming the disaster on Microsoft Flight Simulator and demanding that all sorts of violent videogames be taken off the shelves (even to the ridiculous extent of causing delays in the release of completely innocuous titles like GBA Advance Wars and Sega’s Propellor Arena, neither of which have yet been released in the West at all). It was, you’ll doubtless recall, even worse after the Columbine High School massacre, when some of the victims’ families and some particularly objectionable US politicians basically came right out and said “The deaths of our loved ones are directly attributable to the fact that iD released Doom”, rather than examining, say, the culture that bullies teenage kids into frustrated angst-ridden rage and then allows them easy access to automatic assault rifles.

But luckily for all of us (assuming you’ve managed to read even this far without switching off in boredom), I’m not here to talk about the tired old “Do-games-cause-violence” debate. Phew, eh? Because the thing that you always notice at times like this is how feeble the defence of the pro-games side is. The only positive aspect of gaming anyone ever seems to be able to come up with is that it supposedly “improves your hand-eye co-ordination”, which as well as being vague in the extreme, is also tosh. If you’re old enough to play games and you haven’t got basic hand-eye co-ordination sorted out, you should probably see a doctor. There may be something seriously wrong with you.

But in fact, there’s a really obvious positive aspect to gaming, and it’s one that should be right up the street of all those fundamentalist loonies who think young people should be stopped from playing videogames where you go around shooting people willy-nilly, and should instead be herded straight into the army they day they turn 13 where they can be sent away to far-off foreign lands to shoot people for real. I bet you anything you like, readers, that you’re simply itching to find out what this fantastic public-spirited upright-and-healthy-citizen benefit of gaming is, aren’t you? Well, luckily, it’s right on the next page.

Videogames make you fit. It’s true. Videogames improve your muscle strength, your aerobic capacity and your stamina and will, given time, turn you into a stunning physical specimen that’d make Robbie Williams look like Bernard Manning. Disagree? Then you obviously haven’t been down the arcade recently.

Arcades today aren’t the seedy, darkly-lit, sticky-carpeted dens of anti-social subversion hidden away down dingy side-streets that they were when I was a wee laddie. Nowadays they’re big, loud “family entertainment centres” in prime locations beside multiscreen cinemas and gigantic branches of McDonalds. And rather than being full of pasty-faced teens glued motionless to flickering screens, they’re full of young people getting the most exercise they’ve had since the council sold all their playing fields to Barratt Homes to build 20,000 poky little cardboard houses on.

Whether you’re bopping frantically to Dance Dance Revolution, pedalling like a crazy fool on Prop Cycle, punching the living daylights out of Fighting Mania or flinging and twisting your entire body around in Konami’s motion-sensitive light-gun shooter Police 24/7, half an hour in a modern arcade will leave you sweating and breathless. These aren’t breeding grounds for drug pushers any more, folks – these are great big neon gyms. You’d think our moral guardians would be pleased that young people were voluntarily lining up to pay money in order to take exercise. But no, arcades are videogames and videogames are evil toys breeding a nation of weak-willed gun-crazy sociopathic loners. Those pesky Our Moral Guardians, eh readers?

So if you want to get buff without being surrounded by a bunch of narcissistic, preening bodybuilders, and you want to build up your muscle power without boring yourself rigid on an exercise machine, get yourself down the arcade. You’ll save yourself a fortune (because with arcades, of course, the more you practice the cheaper it gets), you’ll have a lot more fun, and without even noticing it you’ll end up a whole lot fitter, healthier and stronger. (Because a well-chosen gaming program will work out every part of your body.) You’ll be a fine, upstanding figure of young man- or womanhood, with well-toned muscle gleaming in the sunlight.

And then, the next time someone starts yapping on about how videogames cause violence, you can go up to them and smack them one right in the gob.