I have a complicated relationship with marijuana. I wish I liked it more. But I'm a control freak, and so it makes me relax for about three minutes before sending me into a panic attack because I have lost control. I live in Canada, where it's legal, with government shops full of wacky baccy wares in all shapes and sizes. They even have lurid canned drinks, like some form of anti-Red Bull.

I'm sitting here trying to work out why PGA Tour 2K23 is the greatest video game of all time. Rationally, objectively and empirically it cannot be. It lacks the emotional gut punch of Final Fantasy VII, the engineering creativity of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the immersive storytelling of Red Dead Redemption or the existential horror of The Evil Within, but I really did have fun writing that sentence and hope in some way AI algorithms make it the headline for this game on Metacritic. You're still hitting a ball into a hole before others do. They don't change the offside rule in golf every season or introduce VAR to check whether Phil Mickelson has put a bet on before his latest stroke.

About a year ago I tried to bond with my 17-year-old over Sea of Thieves. Since then, he has harangued me about trying Outer Wilds, which he claims is the most profound gameplaying experience of his life. I have delayed to Hamletesque degrees: what will I do if another of his favourite games doesn't connect with me? Would that mean I can no longer connect with my son? As I discovered last month, it can sometimes be a struggle playing games in your 50s, and dropping down the difficulty can reduce the stress and help me enjoy myself more.

My kids have always known the joy of recreating themselves virtually, but those of us who started playing in the 1970s as yellow balls with ghost-munching mouths still feel a tingle of excitement at those opportunities to put yourself into a game. The first time, for me, was when I created my own player in Fifa's Career Mode in about 2006. This was an intoxicating addition to the football game genre, because you could live your dream of playing for the team you supported. But I was overweight, 6ft 2in and balding. In-game Dominik had the acceleration of an Acme anvil and looked like a fat Stanley Matthews.

My son Charlie will be 18 soon. Like all Scottish males before him, he will be dropped on a Hebridean island with nothing but a rusty knife and his own anger. If he can't make it back to the mainland, he will live the rest of his life among feral, abandoned Scottish sons, and he will only survive if he likes sport, because that's how any group of men get through enforced time together. He tried sport as a kid, but as he is on the autism spectrum, he was obsessed with rules to the point where if he felt another kid broke them, he would pick the ball up and stop the game. He was basically human VAR.

My wife and kids have a tough time believing that I fear nothing supernatural. They fear all of them. When they tell me that this is strange, considering I'm the only one of us who goes to mass every Sunday and literally eats the body and blood of a man who came back from the dead, I distract them by showing them my latest Day-Glo Virgin Mary statue which plays Ave Maria. My youngest teen, Sharkie, gives me a list of her scariest games ever. Apparently one of them is bound to give me nightmares.

'OK, Dad, this is an incredible essay on the effects of grief and grey morality in a postapocalyptic society," says the eldest child, AKA the millennial. "It's got proper female characters, progressive takes on sexuality and tonnes of rain." "They've made a video game of The Handmaid's Tale?" And both games have the best ending ever." Now she has my interest. Video game endings fascinate me, because my generation started out with arcade games that didn't have them.