Gaming addiction

Heard of booze addiction, fag addiction and dope addiction. New to gaming addiction ??
Its the new addiction to hit the stands, atleast in IIT. Its been around for 2-3 years and is rapidly increasing its hold on potential addicts.
So what are these games anyway? These are not your typical computer games; solitaire, hearts,minesweeper, etc. These games are technologically very advanced, they involve the best graphics available to give the game a 3d and realistic feel and most of them work in real-time. Many of them require a high level of skill either in terms of speed of action or reaction, or test your strategy and team-building skills. I am starting to sound like a company's job profile requirements, but there are jobs which pay you to play online against other online players of these games, but that's an entirely different story altogether.
32bit graphics card, pentium IV processor, 512 MB Ram and a good sound - system (for the effects) seem to be the minimum requirements for these games( atleast the latest ones).

So the standard games played here are quake, AOE(Age of empires)II or AOC(Age of conquerors) and counter strike. Though quake and counter strike are more popular, AOE has its own dedicated gumbal who play 4 vs 4 team player over the lan an average of 6 hrs a day. Whew, that's quite a lot of time you say! I am not much familiar with either quake or counter-strike, but I can say for sure that I was an AOE addict in my
3rd year and 4th year.

In my 3rd year, I was introduced to this game and man did I love the campaigns (AOK and AOC). They were so full of stories, real stories of many great war heroes who were on a mission to conquer some territory or region across the world. Some notable examples being El Cid, the spanish hero; Frederick Barbarossa, Atilla the Hun (Huns are my favourite civilisation, seconded by franks), Joan of Arc and Salauddin. My only refrain is that there could have been campaigns of some Indian kings like Akbar, Tipu sultan , etc included in the game.

The game is so addictive that I have uninstalled it, after getting frustrated by my having to waste a lot of time on the game, only to install it back again in a few hours. I remember doing this cyclic process n(n>=5) times on a few days. I have grand-slammed(missing four slots of classes in a row) on many days during this sem. Come fourth year and I realise that career priorities are more important than recreational ones and that my cgpa has dropped notches below what it was only because of this sole addiction.

So, I slowly weaned away from this game and finally quit Aoeing sometime during the beginning of last year.
Though the withdrawal was painful, I gritted my teeth and trudged away from this path to insane gaming and eventual insanity and have never looked back since!