Video gaming has become increasingly mainstream in recent years. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that has penetrated to the very epicentre of popular culture. Whether you’re playing a round of Wii golf with your nan or shooting zombies and drinking a few cans with your mates, it’s no longer just kids, geeks and social misfits that enjoy this particular form of escapism. But do we take our gaming seriously enough?

In South Korea, gaming is such a massive part of life that, when they started exchanging heavy artillery fire with their Northern neighbours last year, South Korean defence minister Kim Tae-young had to justify the 13 minute delay in their retaliation by reminding another politician “this isn’t StarCraft.” StarCraft (a sci-fi RTS game) is something of a national obsession in South Korea, with tournaments regularly televised, and it has even been used as a metaphor in “at least one soap opera”.

These guys probably take their gaming a little too seriously. We don’t want to see Metal Gear Solid analogies on Emmerdale or hear Liam Fox MP likening the Afghanistan situation to a mission from Call of Duty, thank you very much. We want to know that people love games just as much as we do, but that they’re happy to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Games may be an art form, but they’re also very funny, often without meaning to be.

Dara O’Briain makes no secret of his video game habit, but he’s also happy to acknowledge some of the absurdly tedious things games make us do:

If you’re tired of the stale review format found in some magazines and in the gaming sections of newspapers, there is another option. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s ‘Zero Punctuation’ series for online magazine The Escapist makes a virtue of being hyper-critical, drawing attention to the flaws other reviewers tend to gloss over. His hilarious review of Duke Nukem Forever, one of the most over-hyped, constantly postponed games in history, is essential viewing:

Retro gaming gets a similarly scathing yet somehow affectionate treatment from the one and only Angry Video Game Nerd. Check out his unforgettable meditation on the Nintendo Power Glove:

Ultimately, however far gaming has come since then, some games are still most definitely aimed at “adolescent tossrags”, as Charlie Brooker’s ruthless dismantling of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand reveals:

Whatever games you’re into, we’ve got a great selection of computer and games T-shirts for joypad junkies who appreciate the silly side of gaming culture.