This was better than religion, or this was what people always meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Be Good or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing actually worked the way substances worked, nothing fucking well delivered like they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood.

I became a semi-junkie that day, that afternoon, that hour, that second-fag-length moment. In that first virginal rush of toxins to the brain I believe I started to become my later self; I finally had my internal eyes opened to my true being. Truth and revelation. What is actually going on? What is literally the case? What really works?

There you are, the Journo Catechism, the truth-teller's tale, written in any damn scrip or script you care to choose to denominate, elect to go for or designate. WHAT FUCKING WORKS?

I rest my case.

We threw the burned-out fag-butts down the chimney into the darkness without further ceremony. We walked back towards the house and while Andy was ahead of us he suddenly announced a race, so we yelled, protesting, and darted off after him over the last hundred metres, sprinting across the lawn and the gravel to the porch.

Breathless in the main hall, all pronounced the experiment at the old chimney a failure… but in my heart I knew different.

Despot is a world-builder game from the HeadCrash Brothers, the same team that brought us Brits, Raj and Reich. It's their latest, biggest and best, it's Byzantinely complicated, baroquely beautiful, spectacularly immoral and utterly, utterly addictive. It's only been out for two months and I've played it practically every day since the muggy Monday morning in late August when I first stepped out of the Virgin games shop on Castle Street clutching my shrink-wrapped copy and scuttled back to the office reading the outside of the pack like some "sixties ten-year-old with the latest Airfix model.

I'm sat in the flat in Cheyne Street, playing the game when I should be working on a story. The trouble is that the game and the machine go together so well; the HeadCrash team designed Despot so that it takes advantage of whatever configuration of system it's being played on, with the maximum on a PC being a 386SX running at 25Mhz with at least 2Mb of RAM and 8Mb of hard-disk space free plus an S3-based graphics card fitted. The game will run on anything down to an Atari 520ST and still work (but it won't look remotely as good, run so fast or have all the interactive features) and obviously it'll look just as good and do everything on a better-than-maximum machine, but it just so happens that the above spec is exactly what I've got on my machine.

This is purely a coincidence, of course; it's not fate, not karma, not anything except a fortuitous accident, but dammit, it's just so neat! No waste! No fat! Just exactly the right, most elegantly eco-optimum system — as near to state-of-the-art as I could afford at the time, barely a year ago and I'm still paying the now quite superseded bastard off — to run this stunningly Machiavellian turbo-screamer of a game; an instant classic, easily a year ahead of its time and just possibly better than sex.

I'm playing Despot but I'm thinking about sex. I'm definitely seeing Y tomorrow and I can't stop thinking about sex. I've got an erection and I'm sitting here in front of the machine in the darkness, crouched here in the box room of the flat with the light off and the radio on and the computer screen awash with the seductive, gently scrolling graphics of Despot and the light from the screen — blue, ochre, red, green — throws the shadow of my cock onto my belly and the damn thing's getting in the way all the time so that I keep putting it under the desk where it rubs hard up against the metal strut at the front of the desk until that gets cold and uncomfortable and I have to push back in the chair and let the thick, bobbing weight of it rest against the edge of the chipboard, its big purple head and one little slit-mouth-eye staring dumbly, questioningly up at me like some mute, warm little puppy, distracting me, and I keep thinking I ought to have a wank but I don't want to because I want to save it all for Y, not because Y particularly desires that or it affects my performance but because it just seems important, part of the correct pre-coital ritual.

Maybe I should just put some pants on and control the thing but I kind of like sitting here in the nude and feeling the gentle breeze of warm air from the fan heater in the corner blowing over my skin. So, the big wee man is throbbing, looking forward to a welcome in the hillsides, a homecoming in the glen (even if it's prepared to be palmed off with less), but meanwhile the game is there to be played, and threatens to play with itself if I do the same. Because Despot is interactive, Despot will go on building your world for you even if you leave it alone because it actually watches you; it learns your playing style, it knows you, it will actually try its little damnedest to become you. All world-builder games — emulating life or at least some aspect of it — develop and change according to their programmed rules if you leave them running alone, but Despot is the only one that with a bit of coaching will actually attempt to emulate you.

I light another Silk Cut and sip a little whisky. I'm staying off the speed for now but when I get to the next era-level in the game — and I'm hovering within a few GNP points of it at the moment — I'm going to roll a number. I draw hard on the Silk Cut, filling my lungs with the fumes. I've smoked a packet since six this evening when I started working and then turned to the game. Half a bottle of whisky's gone too, and the inside of my mouth's got that rough, granular feel it gets when I've been drinking the stuff.

I gag on the smoke.

This happens sometimes when I've been smoking too much. I grind the fag out in the ashtray and cough a bit and then look at the cigarette packet. I've been meaning to give up for a while. I keep thinking, What is the point of using this drug? The only cigarettes I ever get any actual hit from are the ones I have first thing in the morning (when I'm barely half-awake anyway and in no state to enjoy it and my chest's usually hurting from the morning cough), and sometimes the first one after I've had a few drinks. Oh, and the one I have after I've given up for a few days. Or hours.

I take the packet up in my hand. My fist almost closes. In fact it seems to me that I do actually see my hand close, see the packet crumple and contract, almost as though I've actually done it. But then I think, Shit, there's only five fags out of the box. I ought to smoke those first; it would be a waste not to.

I take out another cigarette, light it and draw deeply. I gag again, coughing and hacking and feeling the whisky and the can of Export I had earlier slosh around inside me, almost coming up. My eyes are watering. What a stupid drug, what a completely useless fucking drug; no real hit after the first drag, highly addictive and lethal in all sorts of ways, and even if the lung cancer or the heart disease doesn't get you you can look forward to gangrenous legs in your old age, bits of your body just rotting away still attached and dying in instalments for you, rotting and stinking while you're still alive and then they have to cut them off and you wake up after the operation wheezing and burning with pain and gasping for a fag. Meanwhile the tobacco companies sponsor sport and fight off advertising bans and look forward to all the new markets in the East and the Far East and more women taking up the weed to show that they can be brainless fucks too, and suits with worm-shit in their brains go on television and say, "Well, nobody's actually proved how tobacco causes cancer you know," and you sit there seething and then you find Thatcher is taking half a million from Philip Morris for a three-year consultancy and you swear never to buy any of their products ever again but at the end of the day you still light another cigarette and suck in the smoke like you enjoyed it and make more profits for those evil fucks.