It's taken a while to admit this to myself, but it's true: I will never tire of hiding in the mountains, blowing people's heads off from a distance with a high-velocity rifle. I enjoy sniping more than I enjoy leaping onto platforms, collecting stars, discovering treasure chests or any of that other bullshit videogames force you to do when they're not letting you assassinate anonymous strangers on the horizon, which is what God wants videogames to do. It's why He invented them.

I've been playing the new Tomb Raider reboot recently, which is fantastic in many respects, but isn't quite snipey enough for my liking. Lara has a bow and arrow, and while aiming you can zoom in a little bit by hitting R3 – but you never get a truly close-up view. Not close enough to let you stare deep into the eyes of the person you're about to kill so you can briefly contemplate the extent of their hopes and dreams and frailties and secret desires before pulling the trigger to see their finest JFK impersonation. Also, Tomb Raider's enemies are far too pro-active for my liking: at the slightest provocation they run angrily in your direction, so you end up having to finish them off with a climbing axe to the skull.

Tomorrow I'm going to pop out and buy Sniper 2: Ghost Warrior, which has had lukewarm reviews but which also, crucially, has the word "sniper" in its title and is therefore an essential purchase for anyone who, like me, is prepared to spend up to £39.99 pretending to lurk up an abandoned belfry training a set of crosshairs on absolutely everyone who walks by. No matter how much remote slaughter Sniper 2 serves up, it surely won't beat the Rolls Royce of sniping games, 2012's Sniper Elite V2, which rewards particularly graceful shots with an astonishing slow-motion sequence depicting your bullet exiting the barrel, hurtling across acres of battleground and passing through the body of your victim. It actually shows specific internal organs being ruptured in graphic detail, so you know whether you've hit them in the lung, the liver or the kidney. You can also blast individual eyeballs from their sockets, or – if you're particularly skilful – make their testicles explode like a pair of microwaved eggs. But it's okay. It's the second world war and your targets are the Nazis, so these are Nazi testicles housing billions of Nazi sperm: ovoid-shaped mass-produced bastard factories dangling in a funny pink skin sack with nut hairs all over it. Ha ha. Goolies.

I reckon I could watch a highlights reel of Sniper Elite V2 organ-deaths for about, ooh, three hours before checking my watch or blinking. Hopefully for Sniper Elite V3 there'll be an even more comprehensive kill sequence in which, after an even more explicit close-up of the bullet boring a path through some Nazi intestine, the camera hurtles to the other side of the world and shows his sweetheart's expression as she receives a telegram announcing his death. And then it shows his crestfallen kids being told daddy won't be home for Christmas. And then the camera follows them through their entire lives, in real-time, depicting them growing up despondent and angry and unfulfilled, and eventually all killing themselves in atrocious ways on the 50th anniversary of pop's murder. And then the camera whizzes back through time, back to the battlefield, back to the point where you're about to pull the trigger. Just so you can pull it again.

At this point it's probably worth stating that in real life I'm so squeamish I have to close my eyes while browning mince, and so cowardly I'd urinate myself to death if anyone started on me in a pub, even a nine-year-old. I can state with 100% confidence that I will never kill anyone with a sniper rifle in the real world, although I reserve the right to revise that position when it's the year 2029 and I'm defending my water tower from the Brotherhood of the Raven. But it's fair to say a fondness for sniping games marks me out as a coward who'd rather take potshots from a distance than actually climb down from the tree and enter the fray like a man, a theory backed up by the fact that while I love sniping, I detest "stealth games" (because it's scary when you get caught) and "boss fights" where you have to battle some gargantuan show-off 10 times your height who keeps knocking you on your arse with his tail. That's way too hands-on. I'm 42: I don't have the energy for that. I just want to hide up a tree gently killing people who don't exist. And the market for dedicated sniping games proves I'm far from alone.

Joanna Bourke's An Intimate History of Killing, a historical guide to the psychology of warfare, describes how snipers were unpopular with fellow soldiers during the first world war, partly because killing men from a distance at which they pose no immediate threat was seen as inherently unsporting, and partly because once they'd opened fire, "Jerry knew it was a sniper and he would let everything he had loose on that sector." In order to be a successful sniper you need enough ice in your veins not only to kill the enemy when he's unarmed and pissing into a bush, but also to handle being mistrusted and disliked by your own side. This is rarely reflected in videogames, which tend to yammer on about what a big, bad hero you are, as if they've decided you're a bit psychologically underdeveloped or something. It'd be far better if between levels you had to quietly eat lunch in the mess tent alone, ignoring a barrage of whispered insults. Press X to chew. Press Y to swig from your canteen. Press O to stare silently at the table.

Now there's a game.