Just when I thought I was out, they Pooled me back in. Videogames, I mean. In 2005, while I was writing my book Unspeak, I gave them up completely. I couldn’t afford the hours; I couldn’t afford the highly specialized and ultimately useless cognitive investment. But then, after nearly a year, when it came time to deliver the final manuscript and buy myself a little completion present, it was Sony’s little slab of black magic that whispered to me. Maybe, the PSP murmured, some ultimately useless cognitive investment is just what the doctor ordered when your brain is still spinning from having finished a book. You can’t just turn your brain off. It has to wind down at its own speed. Why not distract it in the meantime with some supernaturally sharp antigravity racing that fits in the palm of your hand?

Well, I was like a former junkie who thinks he can still shoot up once in a while. The odd half hour of comedown WipEout Pure or Ridge Racer while sprawled on the sofa turned into rapturous megasessions of Metal Gear Ac!d and Exit, and then, with a DS Lite, Animal Crossing and Phoenix Wright, which my girlfriend could play in French at the same time.

But I resisted buying a new box to put under my TV. Partly this was because for a long time there was nothing on the 360 or PS3 that struck me as new. (I loved playing Wii Tennis at a friend’s house, but it was impossible to install in my compact and bijou Paris apartment if I wasn’t ready to smash everything in it to bits.) And anyway, handheld gaming just seemed to fit into my life better. To get me to spend tens of hours in front of the TV, a videogame is going to have to be as compelling as The Wire or Six Feet Under.

Most refreshingly, since I no longer wrote about videogames for money, I didn’t have to cultivate a professional interest in every type of gamne. This is an occupational hazard — or, as the French put it more bluntly, a “deformation professionelle” — for games writers. Since our medium has been attacked and rubbished from its inception, dismissed as childish, mindless or morally harmful, it is sometimes tempting to overdefend it as a whole, to claim that all games are fascinating and artistic, etc. As an ordinary games consumer, I happily relaxed into a new attitude. There are loads of terrible games. There are also loads of games that, though they might be excellent examples of their genre, I am never going to touch, because I find the genre inherently tedious.

I’m faintly intrigued by how World of Warcraft has become so huge, for example, and turned so many people who don’t ordinary play videogames into glassy-eyed obsessives, but I’m not going to waste hours of my own life elfing around inside it in order to understand it better. The wonderful recent Onion story on “World of World of Warcraft“, a new game in which you roleplay the character of a guy who lives in a basement and plays World of Warcraft, about sums it up for me.

You can also forget about trying to interest me in anything with a cod-medieval setting, or that involves casting complicated spells, or requires me to adopt a fetish for the shiny arse-ends of licensed automobiles. I don’t like all videogames; I only like some of them. And this, after all, is how it should be. Do you know anyone who likes books and likes all kinds of books, from popular exegeses of quantum mechanics to Mills & Boon romances? Do many people like all genres of film, or all genres of music? It’s very rare. We ought to consider it a tribute to the increasing breadth and maturity of the videogame medium that there are people who only play hyper-realistic FPSes, or games featuring talking fluffy animals. That is a natural segmentation as any medium progresses, from the initial fascination about all of it, just because this new thing is possible, to a stage where we take for granted that it is possible and develop certain preferences in style and content.

I once wrote in another context: “You say you love music? Well then, tell me which composers you hate.” I hereby confess: I hate a lot of videogames: they can be soul-destroying, artistically null, atrociously written exercises in mechanized futility. Some games — far fewer — can still renew my faith and wonder in the form’s potential. Even then, there are things I hate about the games I love, and that’s part of what I intend to spend future columns exploring. It’s one definition, at least, of what trigger-happy criticism ought to do.