This year's surprise hit Blue Prince is a proper video game wonder. It's an architectural puzzler in which you explore a transforming mansion left to you by an eccentric relative. The place is filled with secrets, and whenever you reach a door you get to pick the room on the other side from a handful of options. The whole game is a rumination on houses and how we live in them. Nostalgic and melancholic, it feels designed to make us look harder at what surrounds us. This Addams'-style Queen Anne with clapboard facades and dark windows is a classic haunted house, reportedly inspired by the Skywalker Ranch.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping.

Walking through the doors of this exhibition, you are immediately greeted by the PDP-10 - the gigantic mainframe computer that was used to program SpaceWar, considered by everyone except extreme computing history pedants to be the first recognisable video game. Puck Man (later Pac-Man) and Space Invaders cabinets stand side by side just beyond. These are very familiar sights to anyone with a knowledge of gaming history, and they set the tone. If you're a keen (or, let's be honest, old) player then it's highly unlikely that you'll learn anything new at Game On, but you will nonetheless have fun. Beginning in 2002 at the Barbican in London, the Game On exhibition of video game history has been touring the world for all this time, only ever packed away entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a lingering misconception about video games that they exist entirely in their own sealed subculture, utterly untranslatable to books or movies. But this has never been the case: in the 80s and 90s, games (and by extension, virtual worlds) became a major theme of cyberpunk fiction, from the jacked-in hacker dystopia of William Gibson's Neuromancer to the narcotic alternative reality of Jeff Noon's Vurt. Video game history and culture have also been widely explored in book form, whether that was the How to Beat Pac-Man manuals of the 1980s or current investigations of the game development process by journalists such as Jason Schreier and Tom Bissell. Avid gamers and utter newcomers alike will learn much about video games and our modern digital world from these five books. An experienced New York Times and Rolling Stone journalist, Kushner brought keen reporting skills and cultural nous to this examination of seminal 1993 shooter Doom and the young men who made it.

Netflix's latest nostalgia-driven docuseries tackles the history of video games, with a focus on the 1970s, 80s and early 90s that made this 32-year-old gamer feel positively sprightly. It is pacy and wide-ranging, charting a course from early arcade culture through to modern esports, text adventures to role-playing games (RPGs), Space Invaders to Doom, enlivened by enthusiastic anecdotes from the people who were there. It hardly turns a new lens on this period, leaning heavily on the most recognisable games and stories of the era, but it does a better job than most TV at talking about video games without being either too superficial or too boring. Most of the interviewees are the familiar, male faces of early(ish) video game history: the venerable Nolan Bushnell of Atari, the endearing metalhead Doom co-creator John Romero, the eccentric RPG pioneer Richard Garriott and Space Invaders inventor Tomohiro Nishikado. But the series also makes an effort to throw the spotlight on lesser-known figures: Gail Tilden, who led Nintendo of America to multimillion-selling success; Ryan Best, the creator of a long-lost satirical LGBT RPG called GayBlade; Gordon Bellamy, the developer who pushed for the inclusion of African American players in early Madden football games.

The 2018 inductees into the Video Game Hall of Fame have been decided. As of May 3rd Spacewar!, John Madden Football, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy 7 have joined the hall of fame. Each game had its own unique reason for being on the list of finalists but they have all made their impact on video game history. One changed the way we look at sports-themed games, another changed the way we look at female characters, another gave us a villain that will never be forgotten, and one may have kick-started the entire industry. Each one of these games deserves their place in the hall of fame but there are many more out there that deserve it as well. As it turns out you can help decide what games get inducted next year.

When I was very young, most of the computer games I played on my Commodore 64 were not very good. They weren't the classics we all remember; they mostly weren't Impossible Mission or Way of the Exploding Fist (though I did play those too, I wasn't a barbarian). Every week my mum would take me to Wythenshawe library in South Manchester where you could rent games for 10p each. The best ones were constantly unavailable, so I'd grab what I could – weird titles no one else wanted. This is how I discovered the roguelike adventures such as Aztec and Sword of Fargoal with their strange glitchy visuals and endlessly changing tombs.

If you remember Pimp My Ride, the long-running TV show in which rapper Xzibit modified people's cars with gigantic speakers, horrible decals and velvet seats, you may also recall that the programme spawned a particularly daft meme. "Yo dawg," the original joke went, "I heard you like cars, so I put a car in your car so you can drive while you drive". It was, of course, a reference to the show's habit of building each owner's interests into their remodelled car – however laboured the connection happened to be. The meme was absurd and recursive, but it's probably how mini-games – those little nuggets of alternative gameplay hidden within a larger experience – came about. "We heard you like games," the developers of the first ever example may have said, "so we put games in your games so you can play while you play."

The history of video games has seen many fine upstanding leaders, prime ministers and presidents. Stoic Marion Bosworth from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 who instigates the fight back against cyber terrorist Raul Menendez; The President in Saint's Row IV who must defend their country against an alien invasion; and who can forget President Ronnie in Bad Dudes who remains steadfast in his love of burgers, even after being kidnapped by DragonNinja? But sometimes these digitised demagogues fare less well, and understandably, it's these more troublesome characters that have come to mind this week. So here are what we feel are the six worst US presidents in games history. Add your own candidates in the comments section.

There has always been sex in video games. As shocking as this revelation may be to those who have only ever played Call of Duty, Fifa or Pokémon Go, it's the truth. As soon as developers were able to put animated pixels on a screen, they were trying to make those pixels do rude things. In the early 1980s, for example, a publisher named Mystique released a series of "erotic" games for the Atari 2600, beginning with Burning Desire, in which you played a naked air rescue worker. From the very start, realism was important. Later, we were treated to Sam Fox Strip Poker on the Commodore 64 and Night Trap on the Sega Mega Drive, a sort of fuzzy interactive B-movie that was deemed so shocking that it became the subject of a congressional hearing.