Only a few weeks hence did we see Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe bring a refreshing and entertaining spotlight upon modern video games, broadcast on BBC Four. Now its games documentaries continue with the Game On season, exploring games and play of all types. Last night, after a surprisingly gripping piece on the construction of crosswords, the channel showed Games Brittania, in which historian Benjamin Woolley unravels British history through gaming.

The journey was, of course, fascinating. Woolley took us through Iron Age board game discoveries, in which druids might play leaders as a means of predicting the outcome of a battle; medieval games etched into church stones by those waiting to see the bishop; and the rise of chance games and gambling.

Of particular interest to me was the story of John Thurtell, who in 1823 had shot a man named William Weare over a gambling debt. Now, we’ve all heard the various modern news stories, often set in Korea, in which a particularly obsessive MMO player kills another over a virtual sword. At the time I thought this an entirely modern phenomenon, though of course I fell short of indulging in folk devilry towards online games like Lineage and World of Warcraft. Yet here we have precedent, and as Woolley described it this was a violent act motivated entirely by gaming. As it turns out, the crimes do differ as Thurtell had felt cheated by a crooked card game, where our modern-day murderers may only feel cheated. But I like to think that, while there’s no excuse, there is at least past form and humanity has not been corrupted so recently.

Episode one will be available to British viewers for a week after last broadcast on the BBC iPlayer. The programme’s an hour long, and takes us up to the Victorian era in which Indian games in particular were re-branded and sold for booming profit. Imported board games and monopolies from the New World are to follow in episode two, and I gather that video games feature in part three.