I have a confession to make. I am a secret videogame enthusiast.

Ask around and you find you are not alone. Many of my fellow writers do it: work until we hit a difficulty, switch to the familiar game, play for a while, and then back to the manuscript, and lo! — the unconscious has used the time miraculously to solve the problem.

However, the games can have strange and troubling effects on one’s perception of reality. I once had a flirtation with a game called Carmageddon, in which one scored points for running down little old ladies. But I stopped, appalled, when I realised that I was beginning to feel the urge to do exactly that in real life. I would feel my hands twitching on the steering wheel, trying to follow a pattern my mind had laid down.

I was at the time a member of the video appeals committee, an arm of the British Board of Film Classification, and when the subject of Carmageddon came up I found myself on the side of those who wanted the game banned.

If it affected me, an equable elderly female, in this way, how would it affect the young and spirited males who at that time made up the bulk of the game-playing market?

The makers changed the little old ladies into aliens and gave them green blood not red, so the attraction was lost anyway. If they have green blood you lose interest, which was another dreadful realisation.

Since then I have played safe, classic empire-building games — Caesar III, Age of Empire, Black and White — over and over and over as a calming device for my overheated imagination during novel writing.

These games are all cause and consequence. If you don’t defend the perimeters of the Kingdom, you get invaded; forget to fertilise the crops, and the nation starves. In The Sims (dolls-houses for the digital age) if you don’t feed the baby the social worker turns up to take it away: remove the swimming-pool ladder so the swimmers drown and their ghosts turn up to haunt you. It’s all highly moral, so that a questioning portion of the brain, unchallenged, switches off: it serves the same purpose as a quick nap from which you wake refreshed.

Contemporary games are different. They wake you up, they don’t send you to sleep. The graphics are now so vivid and the vision of violence so horrific, one fears for a future in which the distinction between reality and fantasy has been chipped away to almost nothing.

Fay Weldon’s novel Chalcot Crescent is published by Corvus