I HAVE a confession to make.

Yesterday I beat several strangers unconscious, stole a high-powered sports car, mowed down some pedestrians, casually shot dead a few police officers, got seriously stoned and then, to cap it all off, I was violently ejected from a lap dancing club for being overly familiar with one of the strippers.

Fortunately, this orgy of destruction all took place in the sprawling world of a hugely popular video game called Grand Theft Auto V.

There will be those who tell you such games herald the end of the civilised world, corrupting our youth and turning us into a nation of saucer-eyed psychopaths mired in a bottomless cesspit of depravity.

But I’m 34 so, if there is a moral abyss, the chances are I’ve already blundered into it, several times. It’s great. Try it.

I’ve been playing games since I was 10 years old when I wiled away the hours trying to get a badly blurred dot to blow the hell out of other badly blurred dots on my Amstrad CPC6128.

Games have changed unrecognisably since then with the production values and budget of a Hollywood blockbuster.

But one thing never changes – all those holier-than-thou prudes snacking like irksome lap dogs at the heels of the games industry.

As a child I never had the desire to imitate this cartoonish carnage any more than I sought to emulate the murderous rampage of Hannibal Lecter after secretly watching Silence of the Lambs.

A game, much like a film, may reflect a world that can be dark, brutish and cruel – but the idea that games somehow fuel the savagery they depict is absurd.

We are not all mindless sponges who merely absorb and then recreate everything we have observed.

We are not performing monkeys, bereft of all critical faculties, brainwashed into behaving badly by some demonic organ grinder.

There are no magic mind-control rays emanating from the TV, forcing us to copy what we see. Please, all you modern day Mary Whitehouses, dump the ills of the world at some other door.

Blame feckless parents for not bringing up their children properly.

Blame the police, social services and the courts who are forced to pick up after them, blame all the lying, selfserving politicians and the abysmal example they set us, blame God, blame the Devil.

But don’t blame games. Games are fun. They are a mirror which reflects our world, not the furnace in which it is forged.