A few years ago, Charlie Brooker – creator of the brilliant Black Mirror and a former Guardian columnist – hosted a show for Channel 4 that counted down the greatest video games of all time. A sucker for those sorts of things, not to mention a bit of a gamer in my youth, I tuned in with great interest. There they were: Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter II, Call of Duty … on it went until it was time for Brooker to reveal the No 1. “What could it be?” I wondered. I was not ready for the answer, because the answer was Twitter.
A baffling choice and I can’t remember Brooker’s logic for why Twitter was best of the lot. But I do remember his argument for why it was definitely a game, which was that, ultimately, the aim of people who use it is to collect as many followers as possible. Nobody wins Twitter, but everyone plays it, trying their hardest to be among the most popular, influential, important people on there.
