I almost can't believe I have the plastic guitar slung over my shoulder again. Honestly, it's been far more than a year now, and I should be well past this thing by now, shouldn't I? How much Guitar Hero, 1 or 2, can a man play? Do I need counseling or finger exercises? Even my World of Warcraft addiction has loosened it's choking grip ever so slightly, and I've been able to even see that there are other executables on my PC desktop besides that leering W, but every time I walk in the den, that damn five-fretted plastic guitar leers at me from the corner with its lusty curves and obscene whammy bar. I sit down to a book I've been meaning to read, or article I've been meaning to write or work that needs doing so I can feed myself and family on something like a daily basis, but a haze clouds my mind and before I can even think to stop myself I'm five-starring Sweet Child O' Mine on Expert "… again.

This unrelenting passion for a single game, this slave-mind, is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the relentless ecstasy of my mania, and a curse for there might as well be no other game in the world. I am a thrall.

"It's a Psychobilly Freakout!"

I want to say that it's rare for a game to so demand my attention, but it's not. In fact, when I do not have a specific game on which to mindlessly obsess, I feel lost as a gamer, wandering through mediocre software in search of that moment of gaming nirvana. And, when I get the sweetest hint of the big buzz, I latch onto that one game like a face-hugger to John Hurt. Ask me why the first hour of a game is so important, and I'll send you a photographed picture of myself practicing this damn song for hours just to find the right fingering. I never would be here now, if playing Smoke on the Water on Easy hadn't been such fun 14 months ago.

I've played, or pretended to play as the case may be, the first dozen bars of Psychobilly Freakout now a hundred times and more. I don't even like the song, and only barely understand the deceptive and complicated melodies which, on first listen, sounds more like squirrels fighting than music. It's taken a week for the visual representation of the song, a crowded jumble of colored circles like ink drops in a mosh pit, to seem like a structured song instead of a demented psychiatrist's Rorschach test. I see a duck, a cloud, a man with a plastic guitar jammed through his ear.

The notes come at me like someone throwing a handful of coins at my face. I'm not even attempting the full song here, just practicing the frantic intro, a fifteen second sampling of the task ahead, over and over again until I feel like – I don't know what, but maybe my goal will be clear once I've reached it. I complete the abbreviated section with a flourish of fumbled notes, and the resulting tune sounds not entirely unlike someone dropping a crate of ball bearings on an electric guitar. My reward is a number, 64% and I hit restart without any kind of decision I could call conscious.

The last game I played with this kind of mania was, well probably the original Guitar Hero, that or World of Warcraft. Maybe both. Is this just an extension of those casual obsessive compulsions, or has one insanity just run straight into the next? This is certainly not the first time I've obsessed. There was, of course, Rise of Nations, and before that was Counter Strike, and before that Diablo 2, and Everquest and Subspace and so many others. I'm not talking about simply playing a game to some kind of resolution, but playing a game until it wears thin in the crotch like a great pair of jeans.

What, too visual?

These are days of glorious fixation! There are no other games, or platforms, or for those not sharing my passion, players, only the population of the obsession. Hours melt into days into weeks, and all to what end? What do I have to show for my level 60 Tauren, or my rare Diablo 2 sets, or a completed Expert Cowboys From Hell? When the mania comes to an end, and the fixation loosens, what am I left with? Who cares, let's just f'in rock!

It's like going out on an extended weekend asking how you're going to feel at work on Monday the whole time. Screw it, I'll worry about Monday on Monday and maybe a good portion of Tuesday. Why in the world would I want to ruin my fun on the question of what it'll be like when the fun has to stop?

Sure, part of me wants to care about the future, what I'm accomplishing – or more specifically not accomplishing – with these hours of dedicated gaming. I know I should look across the next horizon and at least move on with my gaming life, maybe play a new game with someone else for a change, but every time my brain starts to try and suffer concern I just start thinking about how to make the fingering better on the Jessica solo. When the actual concern fades, and the game stops being important then I can count my achievements and regrets, find the balance that reconciles the whole experience, but what usually comes from those moments of introspection is the fundamental answer to: why am I a gamer?

The experience of the moments. I keep playing Psychobilly Freakout's opening riff, because when I finally sashay my way through that section, and my fingers fly through the cacophony with something like a skill, there is victory and joy of a kind. I keep playing through the frustration and the moments when all I want to do is hurl that freaking plastic guitar through the drywall, because the success is worth the effort.

That's the answer to questions like: why are you grinding away at World of Warcraft, and how can you play Lumines Live that damn much you sad unholy freak? Because, even if the grind itself, the effort to reach the achievements, isn't necessarily a constant stream of fun, the moments of accomplishment themselves still have enough narcotic in them to make the whole thing worthwhile. And when the tolerance gets high enough?

Well, those are the dark days, the wandering days from one crack publishing house to the next. The search for the next drug.

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Note: While writing this article I had to stop no fewer than six times to play Guitar Hero 2. I completed Psychobilly Freakout as well as YYZ on Expert. The Beast and The Harlot is very hard. I can't wait to practice it for hours.

- Elysium