Likely the owner of a light-up mechanical keyboard, one of those garish gaming chairs or some kind of custom controller (maybe in camo print), he is so unbelievably good at games that he’s both the envy of the friend group and absolutely horrible to play with. Because, in the unlikely event that he doesn’t win, he’ll throw a tantrum. When everyone gets together for a casual Call Of Duty session, he is muting party chat to minimise distractions and obsessing over his kill:death ratio. While you’ve spent a week trying to find the time to play a couple of hours of the latest open-world RPG, he has completed it in three days. He plays games like you wished you could when you were 19, only now he’s 36. Typically has no children and an extremely accommodating girlfriend.

This guy played breakup puzzle game Braid in 2010, and has sadly been insufferable since. Nowadays, he only plays procedurally generated walking simulators set in pixel-art forests, for ever on the hunt for something sufficiently obscure to champion. He is casually dismissive of any game that’s become even remotely popular: Undertale? Limbo? Dwarf Fortress? Too mainstream for him. Somehow, he always brings up something you haven’t heard of, which would be cool if he wasn’t so extremely irritating about it. Did you ever play Leaf Journey? It was only available as a browser game for three months in 2019 and ran off a solar-powered server that the developer had built themselves. It was life changing.

Look, most of us went through a slob stage at some point in our youth, and that’s fine. Nobody’s judging you for that two-day World Of Warcraft session that left you sleep-deprived, a little fragrant and surrounded by empty pizza boxes. But unlike the rest of the adult gaming population, this guy never learned that it is perfectly possible to love video games without embracing poor personal hygiene and misogynistic views he found on Reddit. He has never outgrown the habits and embarrassing opinions of his teen years, and if anyone ever picks him up on it, he declares that he is being oppressed by the wokerati.

Everybody knows at least one Fifa fanatic who plays pretty much nothing else, completely impervious to his friends’ attempts to broaden his gaming taste. Maybe he’ll be persuaded to dabble in Destiny for a few weeks or try out Overwatch, but, in the end, he always goes back to what he knows, every single season. He has an incredible collection of Ultimate Team players and will never tell you how much he spent in order to get them. Maybe he even competes in the Weekend League tournaments, staying in every Saturday to get tonked 4-0 in online matches by 15-year-olds with razor-sharp reflexes. Feel sorry for this guy; he is trapped in a ruthless system designed expressly to ensnare him – a high press with fluid positional rotation.

Left behind by current gaming trends sometime around 2005, this middle-aged gamer thinks he knows better than you. According to him, all new games are rubbish; games were best when, coincidentally, he was himself young and exciting. Your attempts to gently tempt him away from his comfort zone of nostalgic reverie will fall on deaf ears. He will mock you for buying a PlayStation 5, because nothing on it could possibly be as good as 1995’s Chrono Trigger. But then he recently spent upwards of £500 on a boxed copy of a game from his childhood that he will never actually play, becoming the video game equivalent of the dude who painstakingly collects vinyl that never goes near a stylus needle.