You don’t play the game, the game plays you!

I'm running – no – sprinting frantically away from a wave of ferocious reptilian dogs. I lunge for cover behind a cluster of boulders to allow my shield to recharge. As I reload my trusty shotgun and regain my frame of reference I can hear the wave approaching, hell-bent on reducing me to a measly pound of meat to through to the pups. I envision what they'll do to me, how they will tear through my hide with their dagger teeth, gnaw away at my brittle bones and spill my bowels like spaghetti noodles over the rocks and sand. I ponder my own brutal execution at the jaws of the beasts like a coward numb with freezing fear. But I can't allow the fear to overwhelm and subject me to its strength. I may be prey to the hunters that chase me, but I will not become the weaker link to my own fear. I will conquer the beast that lives within me, consuming my pride and negating my prowess. I lift the weight off from my crouching ankles and swing my shotgun into firing position, pressing the butt into my shoulder. The gun is heavy, but the mounting tension is heavier. Fuck it, I tell myself, it's only a game. I leap out from behind my cover and aim at the head of a beast, ready to shoot, ready to kill, ready to win.

Sadly the only real winner in this analogy is the company responsible for engineering such an addictive first-person shooter. The video game I'm presently playing, the source of my fiercest anguish and virtual torment, Borderlands, is by far the most addictive game I've been introduced to in my years as an on-off gaming geek. Though my desire to immerse myself in fictional realms inhabited by characters and creatures of no real influence is usually undetectable, I seem to have found this particular example ravenously absorbing, as if it has managed to manipulate my soul with its preconfigured system of progressive triggers and integrated me in its plot.

The premise for Borderlands, available on your standard market consoles (if you can't name more than two I'll hazard a guess and assume you're not all that into the imaginary wars of men on their games consoles), in my case it's on X-Box, entails the mission of your chosen character to find the mythical 'Vault' and discover its hidden treasures (as far as I know this involves some kind of alien technology). Anyway, while on this world called Pandora (I get the feeling the game's biggest clue is in the name of the planet) you are obliged to eliminate as many enemies as possible, which translates as the mother lode of monsters – skags (those reptilian dogs), giant killer ants, toxic desert slugs and winged wankers called rakks – and maniac morons called bandits and the rest of their demented entourage, who would love nothing more than to scalp you and use your skull as a decoration for their blood-baked mud huts.

But I won't bore you with the complexities and quirks of the game itself, as most of you will probably not be as obsessed with it as I am – I pray for the sake of your children/partners/pets you aren't. What is worth my mentioning is the worrying effect the game has had on my capacity to be affected by the real world. Since I impulsively purchased it from Amazon – for your information, Amazon Prime is worth it, but online consumerism is ludicrously dear to the slimming wallet – I've been driven mad with a senseless compulsion to complete the game. At least that's what I thought was happening. In actuality my brain has been fundamentally overridden by the game's operation. I not only want to play the game, but I wish to be part of the game like the character I'm controlling. Only now I'm starting to question who's controlling who, and whether I'm being played like a mindless meat puppet.

Unlike when you're a child and you easily entertain yourself with a few die-cast motor cars and a race track, or a kingdom full of Lego in my case, as an adult you struggle to come to terms with having so much fun while actively achieving nothing tangibly worthwhile. This comes down to being programmed by society's commanding system of equal oppression, i.e. working, sharing, and caring about working and sharing like there's no horrible tomorrow. But I've found my way out of this laborious rut, at the expense of my humanity. Now I am among those men – let's face it, women aren't daft enough to get hooked on virtual reality – who are willing to surrender their lives to screens filled with blood, guts and glory. And this is without any condition. We literally don't care how much the game fails in satisfying the chaotic inferno that is our mannish appetite for violence, as long as when it does amount to a few heart-stopping episodes of death and destruction it does so in a way that leaves you feeling like you just passed a volcanic kidney stone.

The concept of the game as being an instrument for our entertainment is steadily decoded and channelled into the brain's minutiae while we busy ourselves with pumping rounds of lead into the next helpless sucker who crosses our path. We no longer recognise the outside world as having any influence over the decisions we make or the actions we take. As long as the game is going well we are content. As soon as things start to turn sour, though, we begin to find ourselves fumbling to find the right words to adequately express our inner outrage and suddenly we're bellowing out the crudest words in our repertories to fill the void between our bloodshot eyes and the rapid array of moving images that have us so transfixed. Before you know it you've forgotten to shave for about a week and your underwear is starting to treat your privates like they're ungrateful for such cottony comfort by going loose and smelling bad. And let's not even dwell for a sickening second on the grave of fast food laden around my feet.

Okay, so I might have exaggerated just a bit there, but the matter at hand is true nonetheless. I am addicted to this game, and like many other avid gamers breathing in the world of the living but living in the world of the unreal I keep wondering when I'll find my way back, if the game permits my escape. Of course, in the end the restless societal imperative will dictate that I return to some meaningful pattern of behaviour among fully-functional human beings and forgo the sacred interface between my soul and its virtual captor in the land of glitches, gore and guns galore.

Just so you know: a housemate and friend of mine has recently fallen victim to the immense gaming addiction I have just described to you above. Soon after receiving the game in the mail and having played an unhealthy amount during a single day – I believe the sum of my efforts to be around 8 hours or so – I introduced the unwitting poor soul to the magnetising gameplay of Borderlands, informing him that it was the best thing he could possibly play. Now, unfortunately, it's the only thing he can play, for he is consciously connected to the insane world that has become both his new home and corrupting companion in his adventure to nowhere. I fear he is too far gone like a zombie victim in one of George Romero's black masterpieces. Let's hope he remembers to fall asleep, poor bugger.