📸

young men were drawn obsessively to this mesmerically repetitive challenge, which pitched their avatar in a fight to the death against a string of equally aggressive fighters? Did this tame aggression or encourage it? Did the flood of dopamine around the brain’s frontal lobe, which these games trigger, lead to intense addiction in all young men or just in some of them?

Renu pounded away at the machine, drenching his body in adrenalin and his brain in endorphins. When he finished, his body still wired, he hit the Martell to sustain a feeling of well-being and to calm himself down. Slowly, this dual habit began to take its toll on his paltry allow- ance. Street Fighter became ever more central to his life. As he lay down to sleep, the game’s violent images would appear in technicolour in his mind’s eye.

As he had once stopped gambling, so he now resolved to stop playing and he never touched the machine again. Unfortunately, his decision at the time only applied to Street Fighter, and not to his burgeoning predilection for drink and drugs.

His break with the game did not mean an end to his fascination with computers in general. He had loved them ever since he had first played with one as a nine-year-old in Sri Lanka. Lack of money had ensured he never had regular access, but he overcame that problem in his early twenties by accepting a place to study computer science at London’s Westminster University.

Soon afterwards Renu had discovered warez, pirated software programs whose security systems had been cracked and distributed among devotees known collectively as The Scene.

It was a world where he could be with friends and alone, at one and the same time.

📸