Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 192

Great news - the chattering classes may have been finally silenced! According to a three-year study conducted by Manchester University, the middle-class dinner party is in serious decline.

Apparently couples now prefer to eat down the local gastro-gastro rather than invite friends over to see how beautiful their new house is, er I mean, for a lovely meal.
As somebody who has always thought a kitchen should serve as an extra bedroom rather than waste all that space with cupboards of food, this news is welcomed. Breakfast in a cafe, lunch in a pub and dinner in a restaurant, that's how life should be. In fact, that's the most important reason for attending a trade show.

And a trade show is probably where a lot of this newsletter’s readership is at the moment. This year's E3 games show has seen the usual exodus to Los Angeles and mobile has been bigger than ever before, blah-blah-blah.

But instead of banging on about E3 like every other media, I thought I'd bang on about the addictive qualities of mobile phones. According to an Australian report this week, some people's reliance on their mobiles can be worse than smoking and even resembles substance abuse.

While it's difficult to imagine such dependency being as serious as heroin, it does beg questions. Are mobile addicts weaned off their habit by being given pagers in the same way heroin addicts are given methadone? Or they only allowed to use rotary-dial landlines? Or even worse, can they only use handsets that are more than two years old? The shame, the shame…

This is where the dinner party could help them. While it is just about OK to take your mobile to a restaurant, it's very bad form to keep your mobile turned on at a dinner party. The answer is plain... dinner party therapy for mobile addicts.

Not only will they be kept away from their handsets, they will be able to relearn the art of conversation by talking absolute b*llocks over a lamb shank, shitake mushrooms and celeriac mash all washed down by a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. What more could an addict ask for?