Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Today's newsletter is inspired by an email from Iain Noble (hello again, Iain!), who wrote in with a question that tapped into something that's been on my mind lately. Iain wrote: "One of the criticisms I often hear from non-gamers is that video games are very repetitious. Admittedly there is an element of truth in that many games require some grinding to level up characters, make money and get equipment. Do you think there is a specific personality type that is OK with that, rather like rats repeatedly pressing the same button to get a reward?"

If I'd known a movie version of Uncharted was soon coming out, I would have been a bit more guarded about admitting I'm a huge fan of the game to my editor. I am a fan, but I'm also a parent now, and I can't just leave the house on a whim for some entertainment. I need to hire a nanny to watch my kid, and like ordering popcorn and Twizzlers, that factors into the cost of catching a flick. This was this the first movie we've seen in a theater since Musa was born. I'm still waiting for the new Spider-Man to make it to streaming platforms, which is the only way my wife and I get to scratch our movie itch these days.

There are worse movies than Uncharted, especially when it comes to the seemingly cursed genre of video game adaptations. But as I struggled to stay awake through the finale -- yet another weightless action sequence where our heroes quip, defy physics and never feel like they're in any genuine danger -- I couldn't help but wonder why the film was so aggressively average. The PlayStation franchise started out as a Tomb Raider clone starring a dude who wasn't Indiana Jones. But, starting with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the games tapped into the language of action movies to put you in the center of innovative set pieces. They were cinematic in ways that few titles were in the early 2010s.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Welcome back to Pushing Buttons! In the spirit of carrying my perennial real-world lateness over into this newsletter, let's talk about love, even though it is now 15 February and everyone will instantly forget about romance again until this time next year. As 500 different articles will already have reminded you this week, so much of the art that we humans make is about wanting someone you can't have, having someone you don't want, missing someone you once had, or sometimes even how much we like person/people we're actually with.

To steal the artifact, the three kill the lights to the ballroom and snatch the cross before it's sold at the auction. All goes according to plan -- until it doesn't. Trying to escape the guards, you scale red-tiled Italian roofs, a la "Assassins Creed." Amid all the scaling and jumping, Drake grabs a zipline back toward the ballroom, where Sully is ready with the getaway car. But the line breaks and Drake ends up swinging into an ornate glass window, barreling headfirst into a gunfight alongside Sam.

Need some video game pursuits to keep you occupied during the stay-at-home measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus? Sony has a giveaway for PlayStation 4 players. Once you download the games, you can keep them. "People all over the world are doing the right thing by staying home to help contain the spread of COVID-19," wrote Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan in a post on the PlayStation blog. "We are deeply grateful to everyone practicing physical distancing and take our responsibility as a home entertainment platform seriously, so we are asking our community to continue supporting the safe choice and the need to Play At Home."

Fans of "The Walking Dead" will likely relish "Days Gone," the new video game thriller out Friday for Sony PlayStation 4. The post-apocalyptic premise is similar: Your character has survived a global pandemic, while millions have died or turned into ferocious predatory humanoids. If you've only seen the game depicted in TV commercials, at first glance you might be excused for considering these creatures as cousins of those "Walking Dead" zombies. But no, these beasts are transformed humans called "Freakers." "Days Gone" creative director and writer John Garvin explains: "What we have done here is actually create something that is new. They are not really mutants, they are certainly not demons or aliens or robots. They are not zombies either. They are their own thing."

In the span of 45 minutes I watched Lara Croft: 1) Drown. Which is to say, nearly two years after it leaked for the first time and a month after it leaked for the second time, I've finally played Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the third in the series since the 2013 reboot and apparently the conclusion of Lara Croft's "origin story." It's also apparently the one where she becomes "The Tomb Raider," according to Eidos, but...isn't that what the last two games were about too? As I said, we played about 45 minutes of Shadow of the Tomb Raider ($60 Steam preorder on Square-Enix.com). If I had to guess, the section was lifted from very early in the game--right after a short prologue, perhaps?

When Uncharted: The Lost Legacy was released this year, it gained a lot of attention - not because it is the latest instalment for a popular franchise, it stood out for another reason. The game was set in India, had two lead women, and one of them, Nadine Ross, is a black South African. Other big releases this year include Assassins Creed Origins, which is set in Egypt with an African protagonist, while Star Wars Battlefront II used the likeness and voice of Janina Gavankar, an actress with part-Indian heritage. But speaking to BBC Asian Network, Jo Twist, chief executive for Ukie, the trading body for the UK's games industry, said there was still a long way to go before video games could be truly representative of the gaming audience. She says there are not enough game designers from black or Asian backgrounds working and that this is reflected in what we are playing.

It's been a fairly fantastic year for video games -- so let's celebrate. The Game Awards kick off tonight in Los Angeles at 9 PM ET, though the pre-show begins at 8:30 PM ET across a variety of live-streaming platforms, including Twitch, Twitter and YouTube (in 4K, no less). The show honors the year's most influential, creative video games and the people who create them, as voted by 51 international media outlets, including Engadget. There are a total of 30 categories, including Best Multiplayer, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Trending Gamer, Best Independent Game and a handful of eSports-specific awards. Titles up for Game of the Year are The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Persona 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn, while nominees for Best Performance are Melina Juergens (Senua in Hellblade), Laura Bailey (Nadine Ross in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy), Claudia Black (Chloe Frazer in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy), Brian Bloom (BJ Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein III) and Ashly Burch (Aloy in Horizon).