I’ve never been much of a gamer. Ever since my parents confiscated my Wii to force me to buckle down for the 11+, I’ve chosen books and magazines over consoles. When friends would kindly offer me their PS4s, I’d turn up my nose in guilt and shame. I was perfectly happy thumbing through the latest Wimpy Kid edition, thank you very much.

This Easter break, however, I experienced a conversion of Damascene proportions: I’d finally exhausted my options for procrastinating exam revision. Only so many times, after all, could I romp around Richmond Park or rewind highlights of The Office. Alone in my bedroom, with the stealth of a Catholic recusant in a priest hole, I downloaded Minecraft.

“I hoped to recapture a tragically forsaken aspect of my childhood, and resurrect memories of better times”

2014! Oh, to return to those halcyon days! It was a different time. Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ topped the charts. Same-sex marriage was newly legalised. The bank rate was below 5%. Most memorably for me though, Minecraft was A Big Thing. This is not the space to rhapsodise on the incomparable power one game held over our cultural zeitgeist, nor to wax lyrical over the techno-utopianism it promised us all. Suffice to say that, in diving into my new world (aptly called ‘DegreeKiller’), I hoped to recapture a tragically forsaken aspect of my childhood, and resurrect memories of better times.

Or so I thought. After spending absolutely fucking ages expending the precious little headspace Cambridge students free up over the holidays, I was no closer to taming a dog or finding diamonds. Half my time was still spent cowering in a cave at night to avoid creepers. I gripped my Red Bull and, blinking through my tears, reached for my seventh Monster Munch of the night. In my blurred vision, I could make out images of my peers on their Spring Weeks, strutting the halls of Deutsche Bank in their swanky three-piece suits. Dig deep, I told myself. We could yet recover from despair. Something was missing though… what was it?

INFLUENCING – that was it! I tittered heartily at my previous blindness. How could I have forgotten the most significant cultural development of the past decade, content creation? The medium covered everything now, from food to studying, but its origins surely lay in the innocent ‘Let’s Play’ videos of YouTube’s infancy! Step aside, Cicero and Churchill – your eloquence has nothing on the Periclean heights the average nocturnal livestreamer can reach. With a Bandicam free trial underway I strapped in, prepared to take the gaming community by storm and torpedo myself, ever more surely, into the depths of 2:2-dom.

“Step aside, Cicero and Churchill - your eloquence has nothing on the Periclean heights the average nocturnal livestreamer can reach”

A few hours – and three whole diamonds! – later, and I was ready to present my adventures to the world. Ding! Up went the video. Feeling pretty chuffed with myself, I reclined my X Rocker Orbit 2.0, and manfully stifled a burp induced by these sudden movements. To take a break from my productive streak, I decided to indulge in my favourite pastime: LinkedIn doomscrolling. Connection – ping! Connection – ping! Maybe, I thought to myself, I should make the LinkedIn connection ping my morning alarm sound. All was going swimmingly until an innocuous notification popped up. ‘Recruiter at KPMG has viewed your profile’.

Shit. Shit. Grad rec was trawling through my socials: they were on to me! Who was to say they wouldn’t discover my caffeinated soliloquising on YouTube? I almost tripped sprinting to my desk, and took down the entire obscene affair from my channel, stat.

And so, in a frenzied panic over my employment prospects, my Minecraft adventures found their fittingly ignoble end. Despite everything, though, the experience hadn’t been unfruitful. I had learned a lot about work-life balance (read: shrinking from the thought of protesting, when my DoS would inevitably yank me into his office next term for a bollocking over underperformance, that I had “killed the Ender Dragon”). In the end, we all need ways to relax and take time off from our degrees. You can thank me, dear reader, for narrowing down the dizzying array of options for you to choose from.