What do you think when you hear the term ‘IT geek’? Is the image conjured in your head of an overweight and bespectacled male, someone who lives an unhealthy lifestyle, prone to talking in excessively-technical terms and leaving crumbs all over the keyboards?

That’s the stereotype used in The Moment of Silence, a point-and-click from 2004 by House of Tales that I spent around eight hours with towards the end of last year. Unfortunately I’m unable to finish it after a Windows update caused the game to stop running but that’s not necessarily a bad thing: although I’d like to see how it’s jumbled story ends at some point, its depictions of certain characters are horrible. It caused need to start thinking about how we’re portrayed in video games and I wondered if we’re always shown in a negative light?

Bill from The Moment of Silence

Let’s…