Unexpected consequences of a lifetime of game playing

  1. Every time you hear the word “artillery”, that little icon Panzer General used for unmounted artillery pops into your head.

2.) You awake in a cold sweat most nights, the lingering sound of “You must gather your party before venturing forth…” carried by the chilling gusts outside your window.

3.) You constantly wonder how many HP you have, often wondering how many HP you have in all the different kinds of game out there. “Damn! I skinned my knee! In D&D, I wouldn’t have lost an HP, but in a Japanese RPG, that’s 254 damage!!”

4.) No game is ever as good as some golden oldie you remember. They never make games like they used to.

  1. You have had feverish dreams about how to min/max your “civ” in any of the 4x games… and when you wake up, an optimal algorithm has occurred to you.

  2. Valuable memory space is occupied by every damn statistic table in D&D 1st edition. I can still tell you the to hit/to damage bonus of an 18/34 strength (+1/+3)

  3. You sometimes wish you could redo real life conversation to see what would happen if you tried a different dialogue tree.

You’ve had Tetris dreams.

(Thank God, not in about 8 years.)

9.) Your knowledge of world geography comes entirely from playing strategy games.

10.) You contemplate pulling the handbrake to get extra style points when driving around a sharp corner.

11.) You instinctively try to decode all acronyms as game titles.

  • Alan

They’re all true! SOB

(especially the tetris dream one)

Hasn’t everyone?

  1. You are surprised and elated that you can just pick up a cheeseburger without somebody telling you that you can’t do that now, or that they don’t understand the word ‘cheeseburger’.
  1. Whenever you’re around stone masonry, you look up and realize ‘hey, I can jump up and climb on that, then grab onto the ledge and shimmy over’

  2. When you’re driving an unfamiliar car and something beeps, you think that a SAM has locked on and you’ve got to dump collective to get low.

  1. You’re stuck in a crowd, and think “if I only had the three-way shot or the vulcan cannon, I could clear a path in a heartbeat.”

  2. Whenever you succeed in a minor task, a MIDI-esque rising glissonde plays in your head.

Man that geography thing is so true. If it was invaded in WW2, I know where it is, otherwise I’m toast.

An oldie but a goodie…you strafe sideways through grocery stores, constantly looking up and down.

  1. When you play a new FPS, you compare it’s leap-to-death to other games’. In Quake 2, you just turn into gibs and hear that nasty squish sound; in H-L you hear a thud, and then a flatline. Booooooooooo…

18.) You sometimes wish you could just save, quit and go be somebody else.

-When you see something cool like a nice sunset or reflections of various color in some puddle on the ground and think, wow, nature sure has a -great lighting model. What kind of card is she running?

-When you are convinced the universe itself is a game world and physics are the rules programmed by some geek on his godbox.

I knew I wasn’t alone.

I’ll swear to whoever you’d like me to swear to, but I never dream, and last night I had a dream that could only be described as a plot to a first person shooter.

It had moments like “look! I can break these bottles and use them as weapons!” and “if I duck down here, the security guards won’t notice me because my cloaking meter says they can’t.”

Dreams. Freaky.

A mouse hand.

19). Boxes. And Crates. EVERYWHERE.

20.) Late at night, after playing Thief for a couple hours, you go downstairs to get a snack and find yourself gauging which shadows are darkest, and sticking fast to them.

(Yes, I actually did this.)