My 10 Most Played Computer Games (according to Steam). 

I've been meaning to post something like this for a while now but wanted to wait until my latest gaming obsession made my Top 10 List. So, here they are... 

Borderlands 2 – 1,407.5 hours 

This is a 'cartoonish' FPS (First Person Shooter) with a WICKED/Twister sense of humour. A group of us played it to death (as you can tell) and it became one of our all-time favourite games that we still talk about. 

Warthunder - 1,325.4 hours 

I was VERY surprised by how much I liked this game. You have an option of playing Land, Air or Sea combat in vehicles against other players usually in teams of around 16 of so. The era of the vehicles goes from the 1920's up to present day (bunched together in rankings so you're not fighting grossly superior enemies. It was VERY frustrating at first but once I got the hang of things you can see how many hours I put in. I played Ground Arcade mode. 

Company of Heroes 2 - 1,205.5 hours 

Another game that I played endlessly with my main gaming partner. It's a WW2 small unit RTS (Real-Time strategy) game where you get together a bunch of tanks, infantry & other units and try to kill the enemy (we played against the AI) before they killed you. Lots of fun mayhem. 

Generation Zero – 993 hours 

Yet another FPS but with a fun twist. This takes place in 80's Sweden where you've been on holiday, and you're suddenly presented with an invasion of strange robots that are hunting humans. I was MOST impressed by the AI on this one where it really felt that they were HUNTING you! A very emotional and immersive game. 

Borderlands 3 - 857.8 hours  

Although this was an enjoyable fun game it didn't quite match the quality and originality of the early Borderlands games. Certainly quirky and hilarious it just didn't have the replay-ability of especially Borderlands 2. 

Oxygen Not Included – 804.4 hours 

This was a 'try something different' single player game that became quite the obsession for my gamer buddy & me. It's a weird survival game where you get to control the lives of a group of duplicate humans (called Dupes) INSIDE an exploded planet by resource mining and coping with a hostile environment. The trick is finding or producing enough oxygen to make it through the next day! 

Dawn of War – Retribution 655.5 hours 

I'm a HUGE fan of the Dawn of War franchise and we've played most of them until recently. One of the great things about THIS variant was the ability to play arena matches against AI opponents and we became VERY good at it. Part of the fun was 'pugging it' where me & my gamer mate would team up with a random person and fight to the end boss – whether the pug could handle the strain or not. We had some terrible teammates, but we had some great ones too. It just added to the fun. 

No Mans Sky – 585 hours 

Another strange one for me – essentially a galaxy wide explorer game where you hop from planet/system to planet/system mining, building, finding/buying cool ships and essentially doing whatever you felt like. It was multi-player, but the galaxy was SO big I think I only detected one or two other people ever – and immediately left the system...  

Divinity: Original Sin II - 501.2 hours 

A Fantasy RPG (Role Playing Game) with quests, mysteries and baddies to overcome. Mostly fun but could be VERY annoying at times. Although you could pick from a number of character types we did find that replay-ability was very limited. 

The Long Dark - 353.1 hours 

...and to my latest obsession! This is a walking survival game based in a post-apocalypse frozen Canada after some sort of geo-magnetic 'event'. Essentially, you're on your own (the next version is multi-player) against the environment (known as PvE) and in the mode I'm playing the only objective is to survive. So, you have to keep warm, keep hydrated and fed and don't do anything stupid like falling off a bridge, getting caught in a sudden blizzard or attacked by a wolf you've antagonised (or in my case a MOOSE!). There are no other people, not even NPCs (non-player characters) except a disembodied voice on the radio from time to time. I find it all VERY restful.  

Just Finished Reading: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (FP: 1983) [243pp] 

Beth Harmon is alone. No family, no siblings, no friends. She’s also addicted to pills care of her orphanage. But what she does have is native, raw talent and a rare one at that. Hiding in the basement, supposedly cleaning blackboard rubbers, she is introduced to the game of chess by the janitor. It isn’t long before she’s beating him regularly and not long after that when she’s beating a whole room of High School players. But its only after she’s adopted and her new mother needs money that Beth realises that her talent can get her places. Tournaments pay top dollar, and Beth is nothing but a winner who needs to win, to prove that she isn’t just an orphan, isn’t just a girl. To do that being just State Champion isn’t enough. Even being the best player in the United States is only a stepping stone to her true ambition – to be the best player in the world. To do that, however, she will need to do something truly outstanding, unheard of... She’ll need to beat the Russians at a game that seems designed for them, and she’ll need to do it in Moscow. But to do that she’ll need a lot more than raw talent. 

I used to play chess quite a lot in my mid-teens with a school friend. Honestly, I wasn’t very good, and he regularly beat me. But after a few months of gameplay, I finally beat him and he stepped up his game, so I began losing again. Until, a few weeks later I beat him again... and again... Then we stopped. Even at me ‘best’ I could probably see 2-3 moves ahead and enjoyed the mental challenge more than anything else. But, over the years, I’ve still retained an interest in the game. So, after seeing this book (and being aware of the series on Netflix) I picked it up. 

Going in I wasn’t expecting much. I didn’t like my previous reading of this author (The Color of Money) and this probably explained the fact that I enjoyed it much more than expected. Harmon herself is a deeply damaged character with almost no fellow feeling. But she is very much the product of her rather inhuman upbringing in a rather strange orphanage that drugged its inmates in order to ‘calm them’ into a more manageable state. Unsurprisingly Harmon became addicted to ‘happy’ pills and, whenever she couldn’t get them, alcohol. Her lack of early human connection stunted her ability to relate to anyone (including herself) and, again unsurprisingly, she began to interact with people as if they were chess pieces on a much wider board with Harmon trying to work out the rules.  

One of the things I continually wondered about – only having a general low-level knowledge of the game of chess – was how accurate the games were in the story. I’m guessing that they must have been pretty good otherwise the novel and the later adaptation would’ve come in for some serious criticism. Either way, despite skimming some of the longer chess passages, I enjoyed watching the gameplay and her struggle to become the best of the best. Overall, I thought the book had a good solid ‘feel’ to it. Beth wasn’t exactly likable – at all actually – but she was, I felt, understandable and I did (generally) feel sorry for her throughout. It was rather annoying how resistant she was to seeking help (for multiple problems) but, again, the reasons for this dated back to her early years as well as her (wrong) belief that simple raw talent was going to be enough to power through. On balance I’d say I enjoyed this novel (unexpectedly!) It certainly stuck around in my head for a while after turning the last page. I even added a few chess related books to my Wish List. That must mean something. Reasonably recommended.  

Just Finished Reading: I, Warbot – The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne (FP: 2021) [256pp] 

Anyone who has been paying attention to the news has, no doubt, witnessed the explosive increase in drone use and drone power on the battlefield – not only in Ukraine but elsewhere across the world. Drones, it seems, are it. Coupled with drones are the use of highly sophisticated missiles and (quite possibly) even more sophisticated missile defences. It's all VERY impressive. The smart missiles gain their smarts from the ability to self-guide after launch and some can even pick a second target if they ‘realise’ the first target has been destroyed. Some missiles can even respond with counter measures if detected. What they can’t do, of course, is think. They can’t really ‘decide’ what to do – they're programmed with a set of instructions which essentially follow a ‘IF this THEN...’ structure. They respond to the environment, sure, but only in a very limited fashion. 

Drones, no matter how good they are, are by and large, human controlled, human directed and human deployed. Generally, their ‘intelligence’ without human involvement is almost non-existent. Yet they are, as we’ve seen time and time again on video feeds VERY combat effective. Because of this both anti-drone and especially anti-missile systems need to be VERY good and, most importantly, VERY quick. This means that humans can’t really be ‘in the loop’ - they can’t really be given the final authority to engage an incoming target. With as little as a few seconds to respond, humans are just too SLOW. Machines, aided with still rudimentary AI is much better suited to this sort of thing and can detect, confirm and launch a response in the time it takes a human to start to recognise a threat. With the way things are clearly going that’s a BIG problem. 

Enter AI (Artificial Intelligence) or at least the hopes, the hype, the advertised AI. Its proponents and manufacturers tell us, and their military customers, that AI can (at least ultimately) solve their very real problems – kind of set a thief to catch (or shoot down) a thief. The problem is, naturally, that putting AI into a weapon – especially a disposable/kamikaze one – is going to be a LOT easier that putting one into a system to defend against them. Again, this will mean removing or reducing the humans in the loop to save vital seconds but there’s a real problem that militaries all over the world are facing – AI isn’t really all that good despite the hype. We are a LONG LONG way from Terminators or SkyNet (thankfully). AI is good, often VERY good, in narrow clearly defined tasks but take it just a bit out of its comfort zone and it falls apart or simply stops ‘unsure’ how to proceed. Not exactly something you want to happen with a missile defence network during a shooting war. 

These issues, and much more besides, are intelligently discussed in this fascinating book. The author certainly knows his way around the topic, not only from the military hardware side of things along with the tactical and strategic implications of such, but also AI research, breakthroughs in understanding the human brain, Game Theory, and the Philosophy of Mind. It was, for ME at least [grin], highly engaging. About the only ‘fault’ I could find – and it certainly wasn’t a fault of the author – is that despite its recent publication the pace of drone, missile and robot development has already made some observations in the book increasingly obsolete. But, that’s the danger of reading books, which take an appreciable time to become published (even in my hardback edition), on such topics. Taking this caveat into account this is still a very good accounting of the recent impact of AI on military technology and thinking both at the tactical and strategic level. Military AI is here to stay and will become ever more powerful and more deeply integrated into military forces across the world. I was particularly interested in the ‘half-way house’ of human-machine teams (such as the loyal wingman programme adding drones to aircraft to enhance their combined effectiveness) which are called Centaurs! How funky is that! Definitely recommended for science, technology and warfare geeks out there.  

Happy Birthday: Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.

In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he co-developed Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare with Jeff Perren. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The next year, he and Dave Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories that he loved as a child. In 1976, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, he began work on a more comprehensive version of the game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.

Just Finished Reading: Wonderland – How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (FP: 2016) [262pp] 

This was, yet again, not what I was expecting – I'm getting REALLY good at that sort of thing! I was expecting a history of games with talk of why we actually play as adults, how important play is in learning and the cultural impact of how and why we play. Although there was some of that salted throughout this often-fascinating book that wasn’t what it was about. No, it went MUCH further than that. 

The main thing I discovered very early on was that the authors definition of ‘play’ was very broad indeed. Sure, it covered games like chess, but it also covered things like shopping, fashion, food spices, music and much more. Each chapter looked at a different aspect of play and each, to be honest, could have easily been expanded into a book of its own. The author had some very interesting ideas about the position of play (as he defined it) and the impact it had on larger society and, in so many words, put it forwards as at least one of the major drivers of human history and culture. Just a few examples will suffice, I think. 

Take food. We have evolved an interesting pallet that likes spice, which is kind of odd as some sought after ingredients like hot peppers have evolved as a way for plants to poison creatures that try to eat them. We, contra-wise, seek out such things and enjoy the ‘kick’ of hot sauces. Apparently, the Roman Empire spent a significant amount of its treasure procuring pepper from India and this alone may have contributed to its downfall! Later, during the Crusades and following, the Spice Routes became increasingly problematical and expensive. Looking for easier (and more profitable) ways of importing pepper and other flavoursome spices encouraged the Age of Exploration and the modern connected world we know today. 

Take Fashion. As shopping became a more popular pastime it encouraged businesses to both demand more product from their suppliers but also more variety. As standards increased and demand for quality consistent products did likewise the suppliers struggled to maintain output because of a lack of skilled (therefore expensive) workers. To produce a consistent high quality – and fashionable – stock manufacturers resorted to using looms that they could ‘program’ using punch cards which, as we know eventually led to the computer revolution we’re still living through. 

Take Music. Humans have played and listened to music from our very earliest days. Some of the oldest human artifacts ever found – in amongst the stone tools – have been musical instruments. But playing music requires talent and such talent is regrettably in limited supply. Today we take access to music – available in an instant – as a given, but this wasn’t always so. Before the phonograph (that’s a record player) and before radio there was something called a ‘player-piano’ which allowed its owner to load a pre-programmed piece on a paper roll and the piano would ‘play’ itself for the entertainment of anyone assembled. This was another route to the computer age. 

This comparatively slim volume was chocked full of these interesting links between play and the modern world, and I really liked ‘discovering’ the many pathways and interconnections between apparently pointless or wasteful activities and the much larger and definitely consequential results often decades or centuries later. So, when you’re accused of wasting time at the Mall (and that’s a WHOLE other thread to pull on!), or learning to play a musical instrument, or that you like your food too spicy give them this book to leaf through and explain to them that you’re building the future – just one pair of shoes, one guitar lesson or one jalapeno at a time. A recommended fun, eye-opening read.

Just Finished Reading: A Game of Birds and Wolves – The Secret Game that Revolutionised the War by Simon Parkin (FP: 2019) [278pp] 

It was a dire situation, an existential threat to Britain and the continuing war effort. If what Chruchill called the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ was lost, then the much-needed supplies Britain needed to stave off starvation would be insufficient, and she would have to sue for peace. New technologies were on their way and new escort ships were being built (or borrowed from the US) but that would take time. Something was needed NOW. Enter a medically retired naval officer with an off the wall idea – he would get destroyer and escort captains to play a game, ably assisted by a group of young and often brilliant WRENs (Women's Royal Naval Service) who had never been to sea and had never experienced a single U-boat attack. 

Scepticism was, all too predictably, high and at least at first the unit – Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU) - was allowed to exist on sufferance as long as it didn’t draw on too many scarce resources. But when tasked to review existing anti-submarine tactics it showed its metal by not only showing tactical failures but also developing a working, and highly effective, response to the new U-boat tactics that were causing so much damage, misery and death. When the tactics were approved and implemented through training at WATU the losses of merchant ships began to drop, and the U-boat kills began to increase. The tide looked like it was turning in Britain’s favour, then the Krigesmarine changed its own tactics, deploying ever larger wolf packs to stop the Allied convoys in their tracks. The clash of tactics was going to be played out on the already dangerous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The only question at WATU was whose game was better – the Allies or the Axis? 

It’s odd that, after all of my previous reading on the pivotal Battle of the Atlantic that I’d never come across WATU before. It seems that their contribution, although significant, has been largely sidelined and forgotten – no longer! Wargaming in the military has a very long tradition and was, arguably, perfected in Germany in the early years of that country's existence. Britain was a late comer to the appreciation of gaming, both as a teaching aid and as a safe way to try out new ideas and new tactics without putting actual lives at risk. The thousands of games played at WATU proved their worth in both ways by trail and teaching new tactical ideas to many hundreds of naval and civilian ship captains to give them a much-enhanced chance of survival in their respective convoys and the ability to fight back with great effect. 

As a LONG time gamer this was an interesting insight into modern official wargaming in a military context. I played a bit of tabletop gaming (back in the day) so appreciated all of the hard work that went into making the games as realistic and instructive as possible. It was also interesting to see the involvement (after much scepticism and opposition) of young women in the unit and how it both changed their lives personally and changed the military itself in respect to the role of female officers and other ranks. Recommended for a whole host of reasons, especially if you have any interest in the convoy system and anti-submarine warfare. 

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It’s all Fun and Games, until.... 

It was while on a school trip to the French Alps in 1974 that I discovered video games – care of a coin-operated ‘Pong’ console in the hotel's games room. Over the week or so we were there ‘learning’ to ski, I spent most of my holiday money in that room. Since then, I’ve been playing video/computer games on and off on various coin-ops – my 2nd Year @ Uni was spent living in the ‘seaside’ resort of Morecambe where I spent far too much time and far too much money in the arcades – and on borrowed and, later, bought PCs. Over the decades I’ve played a fair few games over a LOT of hours. Primarily I’m a reader but I’m also very much a gamer too. 

My games generally fall into 3 large categories – FPS (First Person Shooter), RTS (Real-Time Strategy) and RPG (Role Playing Games). Over the decades I’ve enjoyed all 3 types, from Doom (FPS) to Age of Empires (RTS) to World of Warcraft (RPG). In the last 15 years or so the pattern has been playing a few hours each night with gamer friends (who I met at work in our IT Department), plus a few extra hours during the day at weekends and holidays. I also had ‘Gamer Days’ - generally on Christmas Day and New Years when I knew no one (or far fewer people) would be around due to family commitments. On those days I’d generally play from about noon (or before) until late at night.  

Looking through my Steam Account logs it’s interesting (to me anyway!) how some games really took off for me – and the guys – where others fell flat. Fortunately, most of the games purchased have been fairly cheap (or on sale) so the outlay hasn’t been enormous. Plus, when you’re getting hundreds of hours of entertainment out of something, the odd £25-35 doesn't seem very much. Until recently I was playing Warthunder (FPS but with tanks) during the day and, most recently, Generation Zero (FPS) with my primary gaming friend in the evenings. I’ve now switched to playing Gen Zero exclusively. So, what are my stats I hear a lone voice asking.... In no particular order (actually alphabetical order!) they are: 

10 Miles to Safety 26.9 hours
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 21.2 hours

Arma 3 27 minutes
Besiege 6.1 hours
Borderlands (Game of the Year Edition) 108.2 hours
Borderlands 2 1,276.6 hours
Borderlands 3 574.9 hours
Borderlands the Pre-Sequel 228.8 hours
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 136.7 hours
Cities: Skylines 8.1 hours
Company of Heroes 2 1,205.5 hours
Don’t Starve Together 41 minutes
Dorf Romantik 13.6 hours
Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2 7.8 hours
Livelock 3.2 hours
No Man’s Sky 585 hours
Northgard 32.1 hours
Oxygen Not Included 499 hours
Plague Inc: Evolved 88 minutes
Stellaris 38.7 hours
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands 74.5 hours
Tropico 5 24.6 hours
Two Point Hospital 161.3 hours
Dawn of War 2 342.3 hours
DorW2: Chaos Rising 130.7 hours
DorW2: Retribution 655.5 hours

Most recently:

Warthunder 745.7 hours
Generation Zero 81.8 hours (with 52.6 hours in the last 2 weeks)

So, yes..... I’m a GAMER LOL. 

Just Finished Reading: Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us (About Life, Philosophy and Everything) by Jordan Erica Webber and Daniel Griliopoulos (FP: 2017) [324pp]

I hadn’t read any pop-Philosophy for a while and as a Gamer this seemed to be an ideal way to get back into a sub-genre I’ve enjoyed in the past. The authors are both writers specialising in video games rather than philosophers with a gaming interest so the focus of the game is definitely from the gaming and gaming industry point of view. It was also less about the philosophy itself (which is what I was expecting it to be about given the title) and much more about the philosophical underpinnings used by various game developers in their games. Interesting but not a huge focus as far as I’m concerned. Although games can work well with a coherent underlying philosophy I never really gave it that much though as I hacked or shot my way through hordes of Orks or Zombies trying to kill me. Much like my interest in music – I like what I hear without knowing much or anything about the artist or group – my knowledge of individual developers or even gaming ‘houses/companies’ is minimal. I certainly recognise the names of companies [like Blizzard] that I’ve played games by before but I’ve never been one to seek out (or avoid) particular ‘brands’ unless they’re consistent stinkers or simply don’t produce the kinds of games I usually play (like sports games which I have zero interest in).

That’s actually just a long and somewhat involved explanation as to why this book really didn’t ‘do’ it for me. One thing was that the games they chose to illustrate various points I hadn’t, by and large played – BioShock, Ultima and Portal for example. Although it was passing interesting having their developers interviewed and explaining exactly what they were hoping to achieve it left me fairly cool about the whole thing. The philosophical discussions were generally reasonable although a few times I thought that the authors had either missed the point or misunderstood some of the underlying actual philosophy under the game version. It raised the odd eyebrow anyway! A few of the discussions – notably about the philosophy of Mind (which is of particular interest to me) were interesting but, overall, they didn’t really push the envelope much as far as I was concerned. Despite not being a bad book per se I couldn’t help but be disappointed in it for the simple reason that it wasn’t really what I was expecting or wanting going in to it. I had expected/hoped that it was going to be much like the previous pop-Philosophy books I’d read before. Unfortunately, from my own personal interest point of view, it wasn’t. A reasonable read – especially if you’re interested in particular games philosophy rather than the philosophy of games or Philosophy in general.   

Just Finished Reading: Replay – The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan (FP: 2010)

I started playing video/computer games in the early 1970’s and have been hooked ever since. But, after my first encounter with them on a Pong machine in a hotel in the French Alps, I had a close to 10 year hiatus in the gaming arena. I missed out on many of the advances talked about in the first sections of this totally fascinating history not having the resources to buy any of the early gaming rigs – though I did have a few friends whose families had somewhat larger disposable incomes than mine. My next real encounter with gaming was in the arcades of the seaside town of Morecambe where I spent the 2nd Year of my University days pushing my grant money into slot machines like Space Invaders and X-Wing. I see from the history of such things the driving forces of why particular machines ended up there – I think I was there in the transition away from pinball machines to video game machines – and moved away just as the video arcade hit its apogee and started to collapse in on itself in a blaze of multi-coloured pixels. Machines were getting bigger, more powerful, and naturally more expensive to both use and run/maintain. Then, of course, came the console….

I, for one, was never a console player. Again I knew people with various gaming rigs but I never owned one even after starting work. Looking back on it I’m not exactly sure why. My 6 year stint in London was definitely video game lite except for the (very) odd trip to the nearby seaside resorts in the summer. In those days – prior to moving here with work – I was without a computer but did (briefly) try out the Atari Lynx. I still have it somewhere….. Only in the early 90’s did I reconnect with the gaming world – now exclusively on the PC – with games like the iconic Doom (my first ever multi-player experience) and SimCity. After I borrowed an older model 386SX from work I really didn’t look back and have been playing ever since.

Naturally the nostalgia index was high whilst reading through this pretty exhaustive account of the video game industry from its earliest days up till about 10 years ago. My potted history of personal gaming will show you that most of gaming development passed me by so it was interesting and informative to fill in the gaps. It was fun to recognise games and incidents from growing up and even more fun remembering playing them and some of the experiences I shared with various gaming buddies over the decades. Even many of the games I’d never played, or systems I’d never played on, elicited recognition if nothing else.

One of the things that I did find fascinating was the chaotic nature of the gaming industry in the early years/decades. It was only really after games themselves and the technology used to both create and play them became much more expensive that the *industry* we know and hate these days became such a factor. Before that things were pretty much thrown together and, to be honest, often looked it. Of course one of the main issues with the corporatisation of gaming is the lack of imagination and the reduction of risk taking (to say nothing of taking fans/users for granted). It seemed, at least for a while, that the BIG companies would kill the goose that had laid so many golden eggs. Then came the Internet, independent games designers and platforms such as Steam to distribute them online. With that everything changed……

If you’re a gamer like me this will pretty much be a guaranteed fun read. It was definitely interesting to understand how games came about, the wild-west style industry in the early days and the ever expanding technology that helped it grow. Much nostalgia was experienced (along with a sprinkling of sadness at the loss of some ‘freshness’) and many a smile passed across my face. A recommended fun read.     

Just Finished Reading: Death By Video Game – Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin (FP: 2015)

In early 2012 a young gamer at an Internet café in Taiwan was found dead at his station. He had in fact died nine hours before discovery after a marathon gaming session. He had, apparently, died of a heart attack without anyone noticing. Apart from the lax overview by the café itself the reason why the youngster had died in that way became a media sensation. But he was neither the first nor the last youth who would die this way. The question which intrigued many, including the author, was what would motivate anyone to game so long and so intently that they would put their own physical well-being at the ultimate risk. So he went to find out.

Since there earliest incarnation’s computer/video games has been designed to be compulsive. With the advent of coin operated gaming machines in arcades across the world this compulsiveness moved into high gear. The more addictive a game was the more money it would make in the arcades – simple. This quality, using techniques like micro-rewards and other endorphin releasing methods, moved on-line in massive multi-player games (MMO’s) like Everquest and World of Warcraft (and countless others) with level and power ups, loot boxes, rare drops and high demand rare items. You could literally lose yourself in the game. That was the whole point. These were not the kind of games that you could drop into for the odd 20 minutes. They required dedication, staying power, investment if you wanted to progress along quest chains and show off your latest armour or spell to friends and enemies alike.

But a simple addiction to reward can’t explain everything – and it doesn’t. Gaming to death goes deeper – much deeper. Games offer places that are, ironically, safer than the real world. In places even as violent as Call of Duty (CoD) you know the rules and the rewards that come your way are because of your skill and persistent effort. With time and some skill a kid you’d hardly notice in the halls or the Mall could be a holy terror on the battlefield. A kid or even an adult that you wouldn’t even glance at the first time might, online, be a clan leader known across the world. Online a nobody could become a somebody and that’s worth putting in the hours. But not only can you be ‘someone’ online you can be even better than that. Online you can even be yourself – your true self – someone that no one IRL (In Real Life) has ever seen including the player themselves. Online you can find out who you are. You can play a role in a safe environment. You can play with gender and other roles and try each on for size.

The authors looks at these reasons and others to explain why people can sit at a computer for hours or even days at a time being someone else and being somewhere else. He makes a lot of very good points and a lot I agreed with. I have lost myself in games more than once – wondering after hours exploring and fighting why my eyes hurt and why I *desperately* needed to pee – seeing that six hours had gone by in the flash and it was 3am. I still think of some of my WoW characters and miss them as if they were friends or family members. My gaming buddies still laugh, many years after we stopped playing CoD together, at our exploits online and our favourite kills or even our best deaths. That sense of community is another reason why, in these isolated times (even before the Pandemic), people go and stay online sometimes far longer than is good for them.

If you’ve ever wondered what a friend or your child sees in online gaming (or just gaming in general) then this book will provide a lot of answers. If you’re a gamer as I have been since the early 1970’s (yes, that’s not a typo) it will validate what you already know and give you some ammunition in the next debate you have about all that time you ‘waste’ away from the so-called real world. Recommended.