Forums - Ever Been Addicted To A Game

Thank you for providing me with the prefect forum to talk about my addiction.
I have a continuing and on-going addiction to strategy/ war games. And I've made it worst by building a super-game around all the games I play. It started out with Warcraft II and the first Total Annihilation (the one with the robots of ARM and CORE fighting each other). At first I was just playing the games. Then I conceived the idea of creating role playing characters (like those of the Dungeons and Dragons variety) for use as a “back-story” to the games I was playing. I.e., I would pretend that a character I had created was commanding what ever forces I was using in a scenario of a game. I’d make a Windows file for a character, giving him (or her) a name, a rank (but not a serial number!). Since it was Warcraft and TA, which are tactical, they started mostly as Lieutenants. If a character won a battle, it would get a promotion in rank, and I would write a quick description of the “action” it had taken part in into its file.. If it lost the engagement, it would either be killed in action, wounded in action and captured, or court-martialed and demoted in rank. Eventually I added a place for describing what medals it had won. It wasn’t too long before this business began to take on a life of its own. These characters began to rise through the ranks, going from Lieutenant, to Captain, to Major, to Lt.Col., etc, just like a Rick Shelly character. I now have a few Field Marshals. When that happened, I would be using them for higher level games, like Panzer General, or Sid Miers’s Civil War, where they would be commanding regiments, divisions, corps, or armies. Then I added naval characters for when I played naval or star fleet games. (The airforces tended to be army airforces or naval air forces, so I never developed an separate air force). Now as I went from game to game, I was playing different time periods, from Feudal Japan to galactic games like Master of Orion. How did I handle that in the character’s continuing stories? Well I imagined that they were all part of something called, the Space-Time Mercenary Service. I imagined that they were
part of a larger organization that had a time machine that could provide the armies and navies of any time and any place with seasoned officers. Things really took off after that, with the characters beginning to take on lives of their own. Very often, the series of battles a character took part in tended to solidify and define what kind of “person” the character was. Some would shoot right up through the ranks and turn out to be real heroes. Others would meander back and forth in “middle management” between greatness and obscurity. Others would end up serving multiple terms in Leavenworth before being stripped of rank and discharged (and they would later participate in organize crime games, or pirate games, or intelligence op games, or be sent to the “Siberia’s” of low tech, sword and shield games like War Craft or Shogun). And my would there be rivalries amongst them! Along with competitions, vendettas, mentorings, and lasting friendships. And I
would miss the regulars that finally got KIA in one way for another. Just like life.

Right now its very hard for me not to play a game. The characters are fascinating. They are living lives more interesting than my own. I used to wonder about where this was leading me, but I’ve since come to realize that it’s the way JRR Tolkien had lived too. There may be more productive ways to spend time. But there are also far less imaginative and truly destructive ways to spend time. Call me crazy. And maybe I am. But it sure is fun.