This Is My Playground

With gaming no longer a mere pastime but instead a major lifestyle choice which defines our very souls, it's important that those who play videogames for a living share their special areas with the great unwashed of the general public. How else to make them dream the impossible dream, to have them aspire to a life of miracles and multiple different places to sit? I have been so inspired by the openness, honesty and trust other game journalists have recently demonstrated by revealing their luxurious, swag-filled play areas to the world, and now I know what it is I must do.

So, for the first time, today I exclusively invite you into my innermost sanctum: the place where I play videogames by mself, where I write Rock, Paper, Shotgun and where I go to look at websites that I don't want anyone else knowing I look at. I think you'll agree, it's something quite special.

1. This is the 4' x 6' room where I do most of my planned gaming and blogging, the days when I know I'm going to be spending hours typing weird sarcastic response articles to weird lifestyle features written by distressingly wealthy people who I've never met. I've got it all here - chair, keyboard, some speakers I found on the street, three monitors, two of which malfunction. One day I hope to put in a fourth monitor, but for now I just use three and pray that it's enough to keep track of all the very important information I need to know about 24/7. One day I forgot to switch on the third monitor and I ended up missing a new trailer for Borderlands 2. I know, right?

2. I'm an important man with a very serious job, and if I'm not in complete comfort at all times I might feel unable to put all my opinions about videogames onto the internet, so I saved up for this for three years. Some of my friends are actually angry with me that I only heat myself with a £10 electric heater rather than a £30 oil-filled mobile radiator, but I guess I just don't feel inspired to do anything about that right now. I might need to get an extension cord or something.

3. This part of my desk is supposed to be a sort of game blogging-free bastion, but I managed to sneak some unclaimed expense receipts onto there. That ring on the right? That's for my favourite coffee cup, the one with the green stripes that we picked up during a moment of madness in Waitrose.

4. This is the view from my window, which is a patch of scrubland behind this apartment block. It's very important to me that I can see some kind of greenery every day, otherwise I'm not able to post game trailers without feeling a bit sad. Also, in the evenings you can hear foxes noisily screwing each other out there. I never let my girlfriend forget it, either. I love to interrupt conversations at parties to tell whomever will listen that I can hear foxes screwing outside the room I work in.

5. This is some of the stuff I've collected over the years, which I keep on a bookcase behind the door. Sometimes I just stand in front of that bookcase for hours, thinking about how amazing my stuff is, until someone opens the door and I get crushed. This is also where I keep my swag, which right now is just a remote control tank I was given about three years ago by 1C. I should probably give it to charity because that's the kind of guy I am, but I'm hanging onto it because it has a real firing mechanism that I want to try and annoy seagulls with one day. I don't what that black thing is.

6. Here is a) my state of the art sound system which I bought off a guy on Gumtree, and b) my state of the art air conditioning. It looks like a real Dyson fan, but actually it's a bootleg because I'm so anti-corporations.

7. I have a collection of Soundwaves, because I think it's really important for an important online pioneer like me to keep in touch with my past even while I write the words that will help to define humanity's future.

8. This is my filing system and Gaming Accessory Battlestation. When I need to get even more serious about games, this is where I come to. The cable on that gamepad just about reaches the back of my PC, so I only have to lean forwards in my Argos office chair a little.

9. Yeah, there's 10p on the floor. No biggie. I'm not the kind of guy who needs to pick up every 10p he sees. I could leave that there forever, just to show how unimportant money is to me.

I'm not allowed to play games anywhere else in our flat, though sometimes I use the iPad while on the khazi.