“Mario Kart tournament!” my son cries, a little after we have asked him to formulate a plan for a game we can all play together. We primarily get him to choose games for us to play because he’s such a sore loser that it helps if he makes all the rules. But it has a secondary benefit in the fact that his approach to any game is to codify said rules in such detail that we all get a break from his charming, but incessant, demands that we play something. Within seconds he’s rushing to his little desk to root out a pencil and paper to tabulate the terms and conditions of our afternoon’s entertainment.Soon he is creating elaborate brackets, and detailing who will play who, and how, in a manner he claims will be as fair as possible, but which will generally allow him the best chance of winning. “Daddy will play Mummy,” he says, bounding into the kitchen some 45 minutes later, his face itself scribbled lightly with pencil, his hands clutching a sheaf of paper in the manner of a 16th-century town crier reading out a new ordinance for a plague town.“But since Daddy is better at Mario Kart than Mummy,” he continues, adding a detail which I greatly enjoy getting to place here on the record, “she can use the good controller, and he has to use the other one.” This is to be expected, since the quality variance of our two controllers is common knowledge and, indeed, a major talking point when any such tournament is declared. In the opposite bracket, which my son indicates with a grubby, lead-blackened fingertip, he will play his little sister, who is so bad at Mario Kart that she will not only get to use the good controller, but will also receive direct external support from one parent. Again, after judicious discussion and much consulting of his notes, he decides this parent will be his mum, since – and, once again, I only include this detail to give an authentic record of events – she is a great deal worse at Mario Kart than I, his much more talented, skilled and discerning father.[ Séamas O’Reilly: ‘As I’ve grown older I’ve realised how formative the Troubles were’Opens in new window ]Further ground rules prompt more debate. His most controversial stipulation is that we play the game on the slowest possible setting because he is, in layman’s terms, an ambitionless coward who baulks at the adrenaline dart of pure competition. More discussion ensues, as he and my wife make clear that our four-year-old daughter will fare better in this contest if it’s as slow as possible, making this the “fairest” option by far. It is left to me to argue the alternative, and correct, view that playing Mario Kart at anything lower than 100cc is like taking part in a foot race through a swimming pool filled with treacle. My cries fall on deaf ears but, with infinite grace, I submit myself to that which political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”.After what feels like a fortnight, the games get under way. I smash my wife handily in our matchup, before my son takes on his sister, with her pressing the A button and her mum manipulating the directions. Since my son reacts so badly to losing, and my daughter is just happy to be involved, if her thumb slips off the accelerator button once or twice, we see no reason to correct her. Much of her race is spent moving slowly backwards and, before long, the final is set.It’s me versus him. He, cocky and self-delighted. Me, imperious and calm. He, making a great early start. Me, gaining on him with precision and poise. He, taking me out with a shell, in an act of such awful sportsmanship that I consider writing a letter to Nintendo lobbying for a suite of rule changes. Me, slowly realising that the battery for the bad controller I’ve been left with has run out. He, charging through the finish line, triumphant. Me, with great dignity and gravitas, throwing the dead, possibly sabotaged, controller down and demanding a rematch.To this, he objects, refusing to see the plain truth in front of his eyes. Worse still, my traitorous wife joins him in refusing to accept my moral victory, much less my demands he be stripped of his title and, perhaps, kicked out of the family entirely. It’s a sorry sight, their denials and equivocation, truly, depressing to behold. I mean, honestly – is there anything worse than a sore loser?