I realized I was playing too much World of Warcraft when I played as many hours in a year as I billed at work.

Sometimes when I am playing games for long periods of time and then try to go to sleep right afterwards I have extremely vivid dreams about how to overcome certain obstacles or where the story might go.

A few games I can remember off the top of my head: N+, Oblivion, Lost Odyssey, CoD 4...

I'd say that Morrowind Xbox was the most addicted I've ever been to a game in terms of gametime invested vs. time elapsed in the real world.

I spent the better part of the summer during its release deep in marathon sessions that could easily last 8+ hours a day. I felt like a new parent because I was constantly walking around like a sleep-deprived zombie.

The only other time I strung so many sleep-deprived days together were the final games of the Red Sox/Yankees '04 AL Championship Series (that seemed to go into overtime for every friggin' game).

After playing several long nightly sessions of Goldeneye 64 (sneaking into bases without tripping security), I was walking around the office at work slightly bleary eyed when I turned a corner and froze. In front of me was a security camera and my body had instantly kicked into a reaction/desire to shoot it. Until my higher brain readjusted the context going "whoa, whoa... calm down boy".

It happened in like a split second but I distinctly recall the motor memory of my thumb and hands (at the sides of my body in usual walking position and not grasping a joystick) trying to clinch the joystick and grasp the analog stick and nothing being there and going "eh?"

I knew I had played too much Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening when I turned the game off but the music didn't stop.

In high school when we would have weekly tournaments, I shaved my goatee into the shape of the Quake 3 symbol. Line down the middle of my chin, and the two "horns" curving around.

I was going to dye it red and then thought better of it.

Now I kind of wish I had.

In fact, now that I think of it, screw this playing too much stuff. I looked awesome.

A few years ago, I was playing Forza Motorsports pretty much non-stop. One Saturday morning I'm driving home from a party at a friend's house the previous night. Large quantities of alcohol had been involved so my brain was a little foggy that morning. I stopped at a red light behind a black Ford Focus and the first thought that went through my mind was; "How the hell did he get a black one? The only colors I've seen are the blue or white ones. I wonder what he had to do to unlock it."

I realized I had been playing too much Half-Life when upon heading to class and remembering that there was a test that day, I tried to quicksave in case I got a bad grade it.

I realized I had been playing too much WoW when I was coming home from work and I actually took several steps off the path to the front door towards a plant because I thought it was Kingsblood.

I realized I was playing too much Sudoku when I began dreaming about it. Solving puzzles in your sleep is f'ing impossible!

I realized I played too much Sudoku, when I was starting trying to figure out just how many actual workable variations there were, and started seriously considering writing a program to figure them all out. I think I worked it out to guess at the high end there would be 300 million possible arrangements (not counting trivial variations), since you quickly reduce the numbers possible entries for each separate space as more of the grid is filled in. (I think if you have 15 or so spaces filled in there is always only 1 answer)

edit: having looked it up, it turns out there are about 5 million base puzzles, taking into acount number substitution (which I included), rotation and reflection(both of which I didn't), and the current best known minimum provided numbers is at 17 (using standard Sudoku rules).

Not bad for someone sitting at work maping it out in a 4"x6" piece of paper.

I knew I was playing to much GAME NAME HERE, when I wrote jcgamer (my old gamer tag from middleschool) as my name on an end of the year test. The teacher did not find it amusing. Nor did I when I had to raise my hand in shame. She probably thought it was on purpose.

Might as well go all the way...

No.

There's such a thing as too much, though.

When I was in high school, my father apparently bolted straight up in the middle of the night, waking my mother up yelling "I have to save my people!". Apparently he was dreaming of civilization, and decided to take a bit of a break.

When the first Telling of A Tale in the Desert launched, I was unemployed for awhile, and playing nearly non-stop. I did find a job, and the first day driving there, I was evaluating all of the trees I saw for how many pieces of wood they were likely to give me.

I realized I was playing too much Football manager 20## when I knew who the hot Football prospects in any given year are and have press conferences in my dreams.

I realized I was playing too much Civ 2 when I was kid that the entire summer went by in a flash and next thing I knew I was in school again.