Ah, well thank heck for that. I thought I’d spent my weekend hunched over a screen in a goblinesque sweat-trance. No! Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 voice actor Andy Serkis: I was simply partaking in some vital culture; a veritable Wildean sophisticate. Film industry folks thought games were “not an art form in any stretch,” Serkis told Game Watcher, “and gradually it’s taken over the film industry, which could not exist without it.” Take that, Roger Ebert’s dead wrong dead horse of a dead body.

“I wouldn’t have called myself a gamer at all,” said the Lord Of The Rings actor, who also worked on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West with Alex Garland. "But I was always very interested in next generation storytelling. Around 2004, when we made Heavenly Sword, I started our performance capture studio with a view to create immersive stories outside of traditional 2D experiences, like cinema or television.”

“There used to be a terrible snobbery from the film industry with [videogames] being the lesser cousin,” Serkis said. “That they didn’t really tell stories, it was just about the gameplay, hack ‘n’ slash, and killing people”. But games have “come of age” since then, he says. "There are actors coming out of drama schools who want to be in videogames and see it as another part of the palate of what it is to be a performer.”