What psychological damage have you suffered from 1980s computer games?

NEW research suggests gaming can improve wellbeing. But today’s games aren’t the maddening frustration-fests of the 1980s. Find out how you’ve been mentally scarred: 

Manic Miner

You played this obsessively because it was one of the few games that was actually good, with the result that an incessant tinny loop of Hall of the Mountain King is still playing somewhere in the back of your brain.

Psychological damage: Permanent 40-point reduction in IQ, visceral loathing of classical music.

Tir Na Nog

Adventure based on Celtic folklore with an impressive walking animation, which you watched for hours as you wandered through a featureless wilderness without ever having the faintest idea what you were meant to be doing.

Psychological damage: lifelong feelings of imposter syndrome.

Elite

Groundbreaking space combat, trade and narcotics smuggling game, which was mostly like watching that starfield screensaver until another spaceship appeared and the graphics would slow to a rage-inducing snail’s pace.

Psychological damage: anger issues, obsession with the high profit margins of drug smuggling resulting in a stay in a Bolivian prison later in life.

Pirate Adventure

Difficult text-only adventure that would baffle today’s younger gamers. Great fun if you loved laboriously typing in every minor action: ‘get sack’, ‘open sack’, ‘get torch’, ‘drop sack’, etc.

Psychological damage: becoming an anal retentive and/or working in IT.

Chuckie Egg

Collect the eggs in a vast, menacing chicken coop full of monstrous human-sized hens and a giant menacing duck. After completing all 40 levels, you had to carry on doing the same thing forever.

Psychological damage: ornithophobia, crushing sense of the futility of existence.

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Next lockdown to immediately follow this lockdown but to be a separate different lockdown

THE government has confirmed that immediately following this lockdown there will be another lockdown but that it is a totally different lockdown. 

Health secretary Matt Hancock explained that he would not even consider extending the English lockdown and ruining Christmas for millions but that, due to circumstances beyond his control, an entirely separate third lockdown would be imposed.

Wearing his usual shit-eating out-of-his-depth grin, he continued: “We have made a promise to the people of England that this lockdown will end on December 2nd, and we will keep that promise.

“The next lockdown will be based on the tiers system and introduce a new fourth tier, under which all non-essential and hospitality businesses must close and travel is discouraged. The whole of England will be in this tier.

“So, as you can see, anyone claiming we have kept the country in lockdown is wrong and our friends in the right-wing media can shut up about it. And also, it’s all the public’s fault.”

In accordance with government policy, there will be a day between the two lockdowns where all the pubs are open so everyone can go out and really give the R number a boost.