Picture your columnist sat at home in a grimy, ripped T-shirt and camouflage trousers, cigar clenched between his teeth, shouting “Come on!” at the TV screen while blasting merry hell out of Time Crisis 2 with the shotgun shells. A disturbing image, to be sure, but it does illustrate the basic attraction of the videogame form: power.

No doubt some Edge readers are besuited, staff-rationalising CEOs of large corporations, or perhaps members of the European Parliament, but the truth is that most of us don’t have much power in our daily lives, and videogames offer to remedy this situation for us. This is why to say that a game such as Time Crisis 2 is just “escapism” is not telling the whole story. The notion of escapism implies a simple desire for removal from one’s immediate surroundings, without any preference as to the destination. But a game that landed us in an even more tedious and impotent role than we enjoy in our real lives would not be much fun. A game should make us feel more important, not less. It should give us more power.

Power, of course, has many masks. When Nietzsche declared that a “will to power”, rather than a namby-pamby will to continue existing, was the driving force behind all living things, he didn’t mean that your average amoeba dreamt secretly of becoming a Napoleon among amoebas, of invading the next rock with his single-celled army and eventually bending the entire beach to his stern, jelly-like will. For an amoeba, power is exerted simply through the constant battle with its environment.

Similarly, when playing games, we humans do not necessarily have to exert power through the miming of violent acts. The surge of power through one’s veins when one has calculated a forced win in chess is one of the most brutally enjoyable there is, even though one’s own actions – shuffling carved bits of wood around – are on the surface entirely innocuous. And although our enjoyment of Time Crisis 2 would be diminished if we were just shooting cardboard targets, there would still be some measure of power left: the power to engage with a system and beat it. The game then constructs a rhythm of available force, occasionally offering us a machine gun for a surge of destructive pleasure – just as with the power-ups in R-Type, or fitting the three stages of your rocket together in Moon Cresta.

Less obviously violent videogames can offer greater and more subtle varieties of power to play with. There is, for example, the simple power of ordering a character about – being able to make Mario or Lara do exactly what you want, and having your inputs amplified in beautiful, complex onscreen animations. There is the power that accrues to one who has greater knowledge than his enemy, which is the principle behind stealth action from Thief to Headhunter. And there is the intellectual power of being able to solve crafty problems set for you by the game designers, exemplified by the gorgeously logical Ocarina of Time. God games, meanwhile, create their overarching pseudo-narrative entirely out of the gradual acquisition and proper dispensation of power.

But power is nothing without control. A hoary old car-ad cliche, but still true. Metal Gear Solid 2 exemplifies this organic interconnection by exploiting the analogue interface to enable a differentiation between stealthy, silent movement and all-out action. All too often, though, videogames are frustrating when they limit your power in inconsistent ways.

Such flaws can be no less annoying for being subtle. Ico, for example, is in many ways a laudably beautiful and thoughtful game, but the most serious flaw is that it does not offer the player a first-person lookaround function. This is, after all, a game that is predicated on the user’s acquisition of power over her environment: a gradual ability to negotiate and exploit its lovely and complex spaces. But it is arguably burdened by the fact that it is made more difficult than it needs to be to acquire a mental map of its huge, multilevel rooms. Sure, the right stick moves the camera, but it moves it from a strange, disorienting oblique position, and its field of view is pointlessly limited. (Do we really need to go back and tell the character to rotate his body around some more so we can look where we want to?) This is an issue of power, rather than a simple control glitch, because it fails adequately to represent the near-automatic freedom to look around that we experience in real life. If knowledge is power, this fault in the game works to limit the knowledge we can easily glean from our surroundings through vision.

Despite their great range of intellectual complexity, the varieties of power offered to us by games are still, one way or the other, basically mechanical. We express power by doing things to the environment, or doing things to other characters. What videogames have been unable as yet to reproduce is the variety of power that is so addictive to many people in real life: power over others, the power of psychological manipulation. Books on this topic have been a surefire winner ever since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and we all know at least one person who, fascinated by office politics, takes great pleasure in developing micro-strategies – “own the silence” is the preferred maxim of one man I know – to climb the greasy pole.

A swift bout of digital ultraviolence can be all the more refreshing if we are no good at this real-life game, but it’s an evanescent consolation. On the other hand, if videogames ever develop the ability to simluate this kind of personal and political interaction, might we hope that one day the power-hungry will be sated by the varieties of virtual machiavellianism on offer, and that we could even be ruled by people who actually want to make the world a better place, rather than simply wanting to spray their egos over as many unwilling citizens as possible? Nice dream. For the moment, I’ll take the comforting certainties of the shotgun.