Confessions of a Computer Game Junkie

Hi. My name is Laurence and I'm a computer game junkie.

The problem began in my mid teens. I was a social gamer, playing with friends just on the weekends. That's how it started. Weekends weren't enough, however. I eventually let my social gaming grow into a full-blown addiction.

Check this out. One night I was at a party, jamming to Deep Purple or Pink Floyd or maybe it was Black Sabbath... the band had a color in its title like most of them did back then, that's all I remember. Anyway, a friend of a friend pulled a Commodore 64 out from under his coat. Wow, this looks interesting. What the heck is this? Pretty soon, he and a couple of the other kids were taking turns booting up. At first I was repulsed. I thought only bad kids played around with that kind of stuff. But when they started calling me chicken and making clucking sounds I gave in. They dared me to try the Commodore's slick 8 bit graphics and cool sounds and I had to admit, it was all pretty cool.

Before long, I let my hair grow long, thought about getting a tattoo, and started hanging out with people with computers. There weren't many computers back in those days so if you had one... you were cool, you were special, no doubt about it. We'd all huddle near the screen, passing the keyboard around, and then take turns on the joystick. Guys with computers got sick of seeing me. I'd go over to their homes instead of going to school just to get in one more hour of gaming. Even when they'd have to leave I'd find reasons to ask them to let me stay behind. I was becoming a real nuisance but I didn't care. I was hooked. The C64 had made it all seem so harmless, so easy. I knew some kids were fooling around with the Atari but I wasn't ready to move on to the harder stuff. Not yet, at least.

After a couple months, I'd started going to the local department store just to get in a quick fix on the Amiga display models. The poor clerks would run me off but I always found a way to sneak back in. One night I broke into a Sears after hours. Store security found me there in the morning sitting Indian-style in front of a glowing 14-inch screen, my cramped fingers wrapped tightly around the joystick. I was quickly arrested and driven to the county lock-up. I was so bug-eyed from playing that marathon session of M.U.L.E. that my booking photo doesn't even look like me. Anyway, the arresting officers left me in the gaming tank so I could dry out. The next morning some well-meaning social workers tried to get me into a 12-step treatment program but alas... I was already too far gone. Eventually I wound up back on the street, tired, hungry, and hurting. More than anything I found myself needing to score a video game to get myself right.

I knew I couldn't keep bummin' game time off my friends so I bought my first computer with money I made cutting lawns and selling my schoolbooks. It was a TRS-80 (remember those?) and it was beautiful. All it could do was blink at me and play a little Pong but for the first time I could game without leaving the house. No more trips to jail, no more paranoia. I loved my TRS-80 and did my best to hide my obsession but every now and then my mother would yell upstairs, "Larry, I smell smoke. Are you overheating your monitor again?" And yet, while I thought I had everything under control, my problem was only getting worse.

I didn't recognize it at the time but I had slowly become a solitary gamer. No more modem-to-modem connections or hot-seating the keyboard for me. Instead of playing with friends, I was playing single-player missions whenever I could. I'd wake up in the morning and before my feet hit the floor, I'd have the joystick in my hands. Instead of eating breakfast I'd get in a quick first-person shooter... ya know, just to get the juices flowing. Instead of eating lunch I'd push the envelope with a flight sim or let it all hang out with a RPG. On days when my parents left me alone, I'd binge on a full RTS campaign game only stopping long enough to purge the gallons of Diet Soda and junk food I'd consume.

My life was spinning out of control. Eventually the TRS-80 stopped thrilling me. I needed more than its puny four K of RAM and miniscule hard drive could muster. I look back on it now and see that it was my "gateway" machine. Pretty soon, the first IBM boxes started hitting the streets but boy, were they expensive! I couldn't really afford one at first but because they were so easy to make (and the profit margins so great) every kid with a lab in his garage started making "compatibles". You had to watch out for these "synthetic" clones, though. You never knew what you were getting. Some might be 100% pure while others might be cut with a lot of foreign parts from God knows where. Still, they ran pretty smooth, most of them.

At first, the flight simulations and text-based adventure games started trickling in. There wasn't much to choose from, but hell, we didn't know any better. Before long, we all had "lost weekend" stories to tell. As for myself, I spent about fifty hours straight playing some game called Dork or Zork, or something. It's all a little hazy but it's funny how gaming went through this weird transition from being something underground and just a little bit mysterious to being something ordinary. We gamers thought we were cool because we were into something that no else knew about but suddenly everyone was in on the act. I mean, I used to hide my copies of Binary Times... but before long you might as well be hiding Newsweek or Boy's Life.

Then, it happened. I got hold of a bad game. I had always heard about guys going off on bad games but I never figured it would happen to me. It was something that was supposed to happen only to other people. Well, I was wrong. I did a few lines of some really bad code and it snuck up on me. My senses were so dulled by cookie-cutter add-ons and "must-have" expansion packs that I didn't know what was happening at first. After I collapsed and doubled-up on the floor, a friend held me all night long while my body convulsed. I thought I would die. Wracked with pain, I spent hours waiting for the bad interface and lousy stick graphics to work their way out of my system. But even this close call wasn't enough to break my habit. Within days I was right back out there trying to score some Donkey Kong.

Eventually, I pawned my TRS-80 along with some of my mother's clothes to a cross-dressing MAC retailer. The Classic II that I got in exchange was easily disposed of in some back-alley swap meet and it was there that I encountered people with addictions worse than gaming. I saw ordinary women, secretaries and housewives during the day, taking in word-processing and object oriented graphics by night. What snobs they turned out to be. Those MAC people would go on and on about their operating systems and finer resolutions. Sure... that's all fine and good when you're getting over-priced machines manufactured in Mexico and shipped in from Acapulco. When Mac went for the education market and started looking for school tie-ins, I knew they were done. Imagine... selling this stuff to kids. How low can you get??? Still, I could see these people were less into gaming and more into forming their own little cult so I got outta there quick.

We were all so very foolish back then, not just the Mac people. We shared our software whenever we could without giving it a second thought. It was all about free love and free code. Power Macs to the people, baby. In the early 80s, though, gamers started coming down with strange viruses. At first, people just got pissed because they couldn't play any more but when the viruses started crashing systems world wide, we knew we had a real epidemic on their hands. Not just gamers, but computer users across the country banded together and begged the Federal Government to give the CDC (Center for Diseased Computers) in Atlanta more funding. After spending millions of dollars in research, what we got were ad campaigns promoting abstinence (When someone asks to borrow a game, JUST SAY NO!) and lectures on being sure where you put your floppy. Independent researchers began developing "utilities" that could help but not cure the problem. Most of the time if you came down with something in those days, you were done for. I didn't worry about it too much though. I was too busy gaming by myself to share my stash so I figured I was safe.

Around the mid-80s, the trickle of games turned into a downpour. Those early games weren't much to look at... but then again the Model T wasn't much of a car by today's standards either. It was a wonderful time to be a gamer. So much to choose from and yet if you were serious about your gaming you could still find time to play them all. We talked about discovering killer game engines the way some people spoke about finding big buds. New stuff kept hitting the shelves along with all sorts of paraphernalia. There were 286s, then 386s, more RAM, larger monitors... People that had been happy with 256 colors now had to have millions. It was getting crazy and I was loving every minute of it. Every day got to be a party.

And as the machines got more powerful, they also got easier to conceal. First, there were desktops, then luggables (computers that could be disguised to look like briefcases). After that came laptops, smallish computers about the thickness of a slice of bread that let you game whenever and wherever you got the urge. Battery powered computers made it possible to get in a game without being tied to the grid. People started booting up in cars, buses, even airplanes.

But as more and more people experimented with their first game, the professionals got involved, big moneymen from California and back East. Organized crime (errrr... I mean software developers) started putting out games with a mass-market appeal. Guys that grew up playing games couldn't find really hard-core stuff any more. It wasn't about gaming; it was all about money now. Fast talking people in suits, who didn't have a clue about gaming, started making decisions for market-driven management teams. Quick buck artists and laid-off programmers from Big Blue started coming up with gonzo designs that promised a lot but sucked on delivery. We stopped being gamers and players. Instead, the game pushers started referring to us as end-users. It was bad. We were users alright...and it started getting tough to face your reflection in the monitor anymore.

Years ago, gaming was pretty much restricted to people who could handle it but as the '90s wore on everyone wanted in. The Internet just speeded up the process. Immature kids with loose wiring suddenly found ways to get their hands on first-person shooters. Parents begged the government to get involved and as a result, we got warning labels and all sorts of laws banning assault games. The Surgeon General released studies showing the effects of gaming on the unborn and politicians even went so far as to ban it in public places because of the dangers of second-hand gaming.

Companies voluntarily tried to step down the dosage (they even started putting filters on email programs) but it was too late. The djini was out of the bottle. It got so bad that parents were happy to find out their kids were just down-loading Internet porn and not logging onto multi-player gaming sites or joining Quake death-matches.

Prices kept going up in the '90s too. People that were used to buying three or four games a month could now only afford maybe one or two. Sure we complained a little but we kept right on buying that trash. Why? Because they had gotten us hooked on their bargain bin discounts and OEM bundling. Sure, you could get games for under $20 but they were games that no one else wanted. Hours after booting up you found yourself needing more. Otherwise law-abiding citizens went underground looking for software pirates (disreputable characters selling "crack"ed games known as warez.)

Ah.. the lure of easy money. It wasn't long before I started burning copies of games myself just to feed my habit. Eventually, I went one step further and started running games for one of the big Silicon Valley cartels. I made tons of money. I had cars, boats, and dozens of girls willing to do anything for a hit of Myst. I had it all. But then I got laid off and it all came crashing down. I had to sell my house, the cars, the boats, my Wayne Newton albums... and after awhile even the babes stopped coming around when they discovered I lost my hard drive. Nothing's worse than having a limp Pentium when girls are out looking for a little action.

So why am I telling you all this? I'm not really sure. I suppose it's therapeutic to unburden myself this way. I've been in re-hab now for several months thanks to a ruling by Congress that forces HMOs to cover binary disorders. One thing I've learned from my counselors is that none of this is really my fault. I'm a victim. They aren't sure whether gaming is an inherited trait or just an unavoidable by-product of modern 20th century society. But whatever the cause they've helped me to see that gaming is an alternate lifestyle ...not an illness.

Let me close by saying that I'm doing fine these days. I don't play as much as I used to but I still enjoy a good game. So don't be so quick to condemn me. If you're a gamer, or know someone one who is, my advice is not to worry about it. Gaming can be a harmless little habit if you don't let it control your life. Just relax, only buy games that you know are good, and remember moderation, moderation, moderation. On second thoughts... just go for it... one more game won't hurt. .....:))))