The games I spend most of my time with fall into two categories. Those with stories, like Half Life 2, or those that can be played in neat, digestible chunks, such as a C&C Generals skirmish.

For a long time I've told myself that I do enjoy RPGs, I do enjoy games like STALKER and Oblivion, where half the pleasure of the thing is slowly building up a super-character who can crush the entire universe with one blow of his Dire Mace +26.

But recently, I've been consumed by this nagging suspicion that once the plot has been dispensed with, stat-building games are essentially just glorified versions of solitaire, or even worse, are just "make work".

If a game can give me a good, story-based reason for having to do a bunch of side-quests, and if those side-quests also have interesting stories, then by gum I'm all for a bit of stat-building along the way. Third-party Neverwinter Nights modules work really well in this respect - I love Witch's Wake, partly because of the storytelling, partly because it's over in four hours.

That's why I'm also a big fan of the stats system in Deus Ex - it changes the way you go about experiencing the story of the game. Because the situations my collection of numbers (ie JC Denton) was put into were interesting, the game maintained my interest.

Contrast that to Oblivion. Here I was with a super-PC, thanks to my role as PCPP tech guy, which could play Oblivion with all the fancy bits and pieces switched on, and I was very very excited about the game right up until that interminable dungeon crawl at the beginning. Searching for a lost heir? Yawn. Dumped in a massive world that barely registers your presence unless you explicitly break down a door or steal something? No thanks.

Because Oblivion's story was, for me, lacklustre, I never got into the game. Meanwhile, Fallout 2 absolutely captured me with its setting and its characters and the whole feel of the game world. But I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot of the early missions were just there for the sake of building stats.

It's like Solitaire. The temptation to cheat is just so huge. Reach into the deck, flip a few cards, ensure that the game doesn't get stumped by a bad deal. I cheated on the original Privateer, because the first ninety hours of gameplay involved doing random missions until you had a powerful enough ship to tackle the plot. Why wouldn't I skip all of that?

Same with Starcon 2. The game is time-limited, so why not use the lander exploit to get heaps of cash, tool up the ship, and get on with the plot? In both cases, the core of the game remained unspoiled - the plot specific content.

Still, at least those games have a story to fall back on, and that there is an argument for doing all the treadmilling (in Privateer, for instance, the random missions would help shape your standings with the game's different factions). How about X3?

X3, for me, is the ultimate stats game. You need to spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours painstakingly building a corporate empire so you can access the game's best content. But you can also download scripts that not only give you infinite cash, but even go as far as creating stations for you in specific systems, or even just spawning whatever ships you like, whenever you want them.

Because this "cheat" exists, it pretty much ruins the game for me. I can nobly refuse to use it, but then I'm gripped with this sort of existential dread - why am I taking the stairs when the elevator is just there? I'm spending all this time doing this pointless make work for the sake of it, what could I be better spending my time doing?

There's no doubt the game experience is more rewarding when you play "properly". For me the very best games are those that make you think you've discovered something unique that no one else knows about - such as what happens to the gravity gun at the end of Half Life 2.

But these stats-games, by their very structure, show you what you can have if only you're prepared to invest 40 or 50 hours grinding levels. And at the end of all that time and effort, when you could have been writing the next great novel or building a patio or even meeting the partner of your choice, what do you have? A collection of numbers in a savegame that you could just as easily have created with a trainer and a bunch of cheat codes.

I know cheating isn't the same as playing, but the fact you can create a character by cheating that, to a third party, is indistinguishable from a legitimate character (I know the experts can tell, but still) somehow drastically devalues the experience of building that character legimately.

The games that impress me are those that are so fun, so engaging, that cheating simply isn't worth doing. Games like Deus Ex, where players deliberately restart and choose different stats, weaker weapons, and set themselves the target of no kills in the first mission, because it's both fun and the game rewards you for doing so at a content level (JC's brother Paul congratulates him on his non-lethal engagement).

But stat building to unlock bits of the game that I've paid good money for already? That I can see being used by NPCs but are denied to me simply because the developer is afraid I'll toss the game aside too quickly? Odds are, I won't even bother.