Gaming Addict

Dear Mom and Dad,

Thank you for not buying me a Nintendo when it first came out. Having to wait a few years was good for me. I think that my life would have been very different had I become addicted to gaming much earlier.

Love,
Erin

I began to suspect I might have an addictive gaming personality after Eli and I got married and I downloaded Snood onto the computer. I mean, I had had serious issues with Tetris and Dr. Mario (I dreamed about them!), but nothing detrimental to my relationships. I also dreamed about Snood, but I also failed to spend quality time with Eli because I was mindlessly playing it. It got so bad that I had to remove the game from the computer altogether to maintain my newlywedded bliss.

Then, Eli got a broken PS2 off Ebay and he bought me Final Fantasy X. Every day I would come home from work and play for hours. And if Eli was playing Grand Turismo 3, I would be sitting on the arm of the couch impatiently waiting my turn. It drove me crazy when he would do a 24-hour race which is often run in real time...a whole day when I couldn't play FFX! The insanity stopped only after I beat the game.

One day, I happened upon the blog of a friend who reads this one (though I'm sure she had no idea at the time that I was reading her blog) and I became addicted to an online game called Kingdom of Loathing, or KoL. I would play every day, adventuring around. I think I just got burned out on the game, or maybe we didn't have Internet for a while, but one day I just stopped playing...cold turkey.

So, recently (yesterday), I started playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. My sister has said that she was really good at it, so I took that as a challenge to play it myself. I'm feeling a little out of control just like when I was playing KoL and FFX.

I need to stop the insanity before it really starts!

But, I probably won't.

Cheers.