Modern life is rubbish. We know this because we don't remember that olden life was, if anything, even more rubbish than modern life.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this article let's all imagine that gaming is worse than it ever has been. Let's face it, if you listened to some of the bleating from the entitled little bum-holes who make up the majority of the 2016 gaming demographic, you'd think being a gamer was tantamount to be forced daily to swallow a bucket of rusting segs, while being slow-handclapped by the ghost of Mussolini.

Here then, as we say, are the ten biggest things wrong with modern gaming...

What are games? Sometimes it feels as if games themselves don't know. Or, more accurately, the people making the games don't know. I go to the cinema, or switch on the TV, to watch. I buy books because I want to read. I listen to music, because I want to hear.

I play games to play - to feel involved - but too often games seem to be confused about what they're for, throwing in things for you to read, or watch, like an insecure chef preparing a soup, which she serves with a hamburger in case her customers don't like soup. Or, rather, a chef who pads out her soup with cornflour and sawdust to make it go further.

Admittedly, the definition of what a game is can be far broader than cinema or literature, but I wonder if that's simply because games are still fumbling around for what they are. Or are ignoring what they are because they're in denial about it, wracked with shame and guilt and feelings of worthlessness.

I've always resented action games which fumble for profundity by bolting cinema or literature onto their carapace. Role-playing games are the most obvious culprit, deepening the history or lore of their worlds with extensive journal entries, or text from old books, or runes, or written on the back of potatoes.

Presumably you can blame Lord of the Rings for these misguided attempts at densification. Frankly, I've never had much time for it, and you only need to look at the Zelda games to know how you can give a game world a sense of history through gameplay and art design.

The same has been infecting action games in recent years, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has finally pushed me over the edge. I'm done.

About ten minutes into Deus Ex: Mankind Divided I knew I wasn't going to care what happened in Deux Ex: Mankind Divided.

I'd already been dragged through more cutscenes than gameplay (the series' usual stealth-heavy FPS, with RPG elements) and the game - such as it was - had begun to rub me the wrong way. Using very coarse sandpaper wrapped around a porcupine that had rolled in a trough of broken glass.

The problem, see, is Adam Jensen - your character in Deux Ex: Mankind Divided. If he walked into a pub everyone would nudge their mates and go "Look at that wanker", while surreptitiously trying to take a photo of him on their phones - so that they could upload it to Instagram with the caption "Look at this wanker".

​Jensen would stride up to the bar in his black leather, and funny little sunglasses, and carefully-gelled hair, and sculpted goatee, certain that everyone was watching him thinking how cool he was. And maybe a couple of them were. The rest were all rolling their eyes, or looking on in sympathy at this evident middle-aged cry for help.

Thanks to the internet, and the rise of alternative comedy, we live in a post-Gawker world that, for the most part, gets irony. We've moved on from cyberpunk, and we don't like celebrities who think they're more famous or better than the rest of us. Adam Jensen is - there's no other word to describe him - rather desperate, a check-me-out arsehole of the highest order, and potentially the single most risible games character since Bubsy the Bobcat.

Anyone who remembers the Atari VCS will recall that its games boasted some of the finest cover art in the history of gaming. Most of us will also know that there was something of a gulf between that promise and the reality of what the VCS was capable of. Here are ten examples.

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. But what of the words the picture does not speak? What of the hidden truths behind the image? Here are ten photographs from the early days of personal computing, in which a tragedy is hidden. 

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that the reason why youth is favoured and celebrated in our society has nothing to do with us preferring to see Tom Daley in a pair of Speedos than Gerard Depardieu. It's because the young are more pliable, less cynical - and easier to convince that what they're doing matters. 

That's not meant to sound jaded; there are lots of things that matter in the world - and what's important differs for each of us. 

Yet a lot of the stuff we're told is important growing up - not putting your elbows on the table, or being a "success", or not eating your dinner off the floor - are just constructs. 

From the moment we're born we're taught the rules, and those rules so become part of who we are that it takes enormous energy to break them. Not having a degree in some way makes you defective. You're weird if you don't have kids. You must like The Beatles. Support our troops. The pressure to be what our world has deemed normal - or valuable - is immense. ​

If I was more cynical than I am, I'd suggest that society doesn't care what we do, so long as what we do  serves to raise tax revenue, and not rock the boat.

​The purpose we're all assigned is to help maintain the structure of our civilisation - but that's never explicitly stated, as it's too big and abstract an idea. Instead, society doles out invisible, unobtainable prizes upon which our feelings of worth can rise or fall.

Do you know what's most weird about Ultimate Play The Game - arguably the most important British games company of the 1980s? There were a mere three years between its first and last games. In that time, the company had essentially defined the ZX Spectrum, cementing itself among the most iconic gaming brands of all time. They were, it's fair to say, The Beatles of Spectrum development.

Though there's no doubt that Ultimate would have achieved little had its games not been great... somehow their magic went beyond the games themselves.

Everything about Ultimate Play The Game was kind of mysterious and seductive. The company's name itself didn't really make a lot of sense in and of itself, but that merely added to the mystique. An Ultimate game felt like a coherent package. The company had an identity. 

Even before you got to play an Ultimate game the artwork was selling you on the promise; they had a distinct visual style that was unlike anything else. The chrome airbrushing of the company logo, the box artwork - later, the games came packaged in special custom boxes, which made them feel even more special  - which was usually reflected in the loading screens... Potentially, I loved all of that more than I did playing the games.

Here's a selection of their best loading screen work, and how it influenced me.

If you've squashed your tatty nub across the gaming landscape over the past week, it would've been hard to miss the backlash against No Man's Sky.

Said counteraction would appear to sluiced from two nozzles: the sheer amount of hype leading up to the game's release, over the past two years... and many of the promised features apparently missing from the finished product.

You could also speculate that the post-release wall of silence from NMS developer Hello Games hasn't helped; the company has scarcely Tweeted since the launch. That in itself has left a vacuum into which all manner of accusations and conspiracy theories have spewed. 

This has all happened in a climate of rank entitlement from certain corners of the gaming community, which has only served to inflame passions further.

Indeed, a Reddit user compiled a list of everything that had apparently been promised for the game, which wasn't in the final version. Though the original poster has since deleted his account, an archive of it has been stored here. 

Sean Murray is the handsomest man in games development, if not the handsomest in all of c-c-c-creation. The co-founder of Hello Games, and the chief inspiration behind No Man's Sky, is a beautiful enigma, his soft lilt, rugged good looks, and "Kiss me" eyes making him a sort of inscrutable, bearded Blarney Stone. 

But what of the man behind the face? What are the main dislikes of the man Sean Murray? As Sean maintains a dignified silence in the face of mounting questions regarding supposedly missing features in No Man's Sky, here are ten things we guarantee he won't want you to do to him, as far as we know.

A couple of years ago, my daughter became obsessed with a YouTube star called Louis Cole. Yes, she fancied him - of course she did - but she insisted that we would also enjoy his daily vlogs. To our surprise... we did.

Cole had started out some time back with a YouTube channel called Food For Louis - for which he ate, among other things, a smoothie comprised of ten mice, a roadkill fox, a live tarantula, a live giant slug thing, and his pet goldfish. The latter of which he was roundly and rightly criticised for, and which I had a vague memory of reading about.

Since then, however, Louis had reinvented himself as a travel vlogger, a self-styled "Global nomad". Of no fixed abode, he's constantly on the move, jetting from one country to another, occasionally hooking up with members from his extended network of vlogging friends, and running to get the best vantage point to film the day's sunset, or videoing his coffee.

Somewhere along the way, we got hooked. The daily FunForLouis vlogs became what we'd watch while having our tea. For at least a year, we never missed one. Louis became a friend we never really knew - a daily presence in our lives. We lived vicariously through his beautifully shot videos.

We were there when Louis went vegan, when he began his relationship with fellow vlogger RayaWasHere, and got depressed because the video he did of his hot air balloon flight wasn't as popular as he wanted it to be. The vlogs seemed harmless, gentle, entertainment - with no real agenda. Louis wasn't hurting anyone, we believed.

A big part of why I like No Man's Sky is the art design. It made sense when I read that the developers were inspired by 70s sci-fi art, from the likes of Eddie Jones, Peter Elson, Trevor Webb, Moebius, and the great Chris Foss. Who, notably, was also responsible for the famous black and white drawings in the first edition of The Joy of Sex. 

I may not have owned The Joy of Sex as a kid - I don't know why my parents never bought it for me - but I did have a huge, coffee table book full of spaceship art. I never knew the names of the artists, but I was inspired by their designs; brightly coloured, impossible, ships depicted against neon skies, and surreal, alien ruins.

There was something distinctly empty about the images; something which No Man's Sky nails perfectly. Take a look at this gallery, and see what I mean.