Freud would probably be able to sum up my affliction with a few simple sentences. Something tragic happened to me while I was in my oral stage of development (let's not make the obvious joke now, mm?) and I spend my entire life insatiated, only appeased by excess, if even that.

People often crinkle their nose when I tell them I've seen The Princess Bride well over a hundred times. Unbelievable, but I know it's true, because as a child I kept a tally of every time I watched it, and stopped counting around eighty-five, when I was twelve, more than half my life ago. On the other side of that tally sheet were hundreds of scribbled passwords to Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the NES, which I played for months on end, in the span of time between finishing my homework and being sent to bed. As I got older, and nobody was setting a bedtime for me, I have found it quite easy to challenge the limits of physical excess, particularly in gaming. I have previously mentioned my 23 hour stint with Tomb Raider II, but I have since matched and surpassed that time limit many times over.

In Counter-Strike, for example, I played six or seven hours a day on weekdays and eighteen hours a day at least on weekends while maintaining a boyfriend and a full time job. Dark Age of Camelot was easier because the boyfriend was playing with me, so I didn't really have to set aside any time for him. During both those games, I would kind of blink a little bit and look around and realize that a whole day had passed and I hadn't really done anything. I think this is the point where I'm supposed to confess what a tragedy it was, but I don't see it any differently than if I had read books on molecular physics or gone "outside", which is this mythical place where all your sins of the indoors are absolved, and light supposedly comes from the sky. Pssssh.

Of course, I've heard the horror stories from video gaming, the depressed teenager, the horribly absent-minded mother, but I've never neglected my actual real-world tasks for video games. Sure, I've said no to a party or two. I've definitely called in sick to work a few times (one of the down sides when I worked in the game industry was that you couldn't call in sick on big game release days, because you weren't foolin' nobody) I had some eye problems when I was at my worst with CS, but that was from staring at the computer for both work and pleasure, and getting vey little sleep. I'm definitely neither tan nor in top physical shape, but I just need to get back into DDR a little, and play a little more Boktai and I'll be fine.

I bring this up because I've been playing WoW quite a bit. And by quite a bit, I mean a whole hell of a lot. There's a part of me that says "hrmmm maybe I shouldn't sit down and play this game for ten straight hours" and then there's the part of me that just sits down and does it. I suppose at some point I'm supposed to "grow out of it" or realize the errors of my ways. But for the time being, I'm happy, I'm socially adjusted, and I'm totally fine.