It’s been a rule of mine never to do the “minor celebrity goes to premiere” thing. If you’ve got nothing to do with a film, then go see it at your local fleapit like everyone else. Last Monday, however, I found myself wandering hesitantly down a Leicester Square red carpet, braving a maelstrom of camera flashes, under the gaze of a wall of slightly geeky-looking men. What on earth was going on? Why was I there — and where were all the women?

I was there because I was co-hosting a premiere, and there were not many women (glamorous, paid-for camera fodder aside) because this was a premiere not for a movie but for a video game — Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was the first time a video game had been granted such showbiz status, a full bells-and-whistles West End premiere. There were musicians such as Dizzee Rascal and Goldie — and, big surprise, Bo’ Selecta, who seems to be at everything that will have him these days.

The razzmatazz seems to have worked: in the first 24 hours the game sold 5m copies worldwide and raked in £200m — more than three times as much as the year’s biggest film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, made on its opening day. In fact, people were openly talking about video games being the new movies, anonymous developers being the new Scorsese.

In Leicester Square I stood outside the venue for a bit with Chance Glasco, one of the developers who had been working on Modern Warfare 2 for the past two years. “The geeks are coming,” he said, laughing, as he handed me his camera to get a photo of him amid the madness.

I was paid to co-host the event alongside Vernon Kay; little did the publicists know that I would have paid them to attend. You see, the previous version of this game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is my dirty little secret. For the past two years it has never left my Xbox. The terrifying statistics on my screen inform me that I have played the game for a solid 25½ days. That’s nearly a whole month of my life playing one video game, which puts me in the Dungeons & Dragons brigade. Soon I shall be wearing three-inch-thick glasses and staring at pristine first editions of Spider-Man in their plastic envelopes.

Except I won’t; I’m normal(ish). Like a lot of people my age, I like to play video games. They don’t stunt my evolution (I think I’m done in that department). As for social skills, well, the main attraction of Modern Warfare is the multiplayer online facility. At any time of the day or night I can escape into my man room, put on my headset, meet seven other people from all over the world and kill them. Interestingly, this appears to be particularly popular with US marines home from Afghanistan.

The game is everything that I dreamt of as a kid: it’s hyper-realistic, exciting and a total release from life. So far it hasn’t made me want to go out and mow down civilians, as Keith Vaz MP seems to fear, but give it time; you never know.

I’ve always been into gaming. My first console was an Atari with a stylish wood finish. I used to be addicted to a tank game in which two fuzzy blobs meandered slowly around a screen firing a little dot at each other. And I still recall the visceral excitement of realising, one day in 1995, that if you had two PlayStations, two copies of Doom and two tellies ... well, you could just set them up back to back and play an opponent without him seeing what you were up to — an early form of the multiplayer mode that Modern Warfare does so brilliantly.

As for the new game, a few days in (pretty much solid; I forgot my children’s names yesterday) I’m really loving it. I think the first Modern Warfare still just has the edge, but give it time. Meanwhile, I’ve got a whole lot of new friends. At the premiere you didn’t ask for Twitter names or e-mails — that’s all so last year. What I wanted was Gamertags. I could tell you more but I’m off to hunt down and kill Goldie in Rio. See you in 2012.