10 Neurotic Gaming Habits (And Their Real Life Consequences)

We’re not crazy. We lead perfectly normal lives, so we’re allowed a pass (or 10) when we escape into our virtual ones, right? At first it starts as a little bug bite in a dark corner of your brain. Soon, though, the itch begins, and the bite swells. Suddenly you find yourself unable to leave a dungeon unless every jar's been broken and inspected for items you’ll never use. And just like a bug bite, you don’t even know where or when you were bitten. It’s a special neurosis we reserve for gaming sessions: a blow off valve for when that old lady cuts you off on the freeway, the McDonald’s dude jacks up your order, or when %$#^%@#$...

We couldn't relax without our neurotic gaming habits. But what if we carried them in to real life? Maybe we already have...

Written By Ryan Woo

Symptoms: To everyone who skips the cutscenes: we envy you. We know it’s just a stupid interlude. Fluff between the gameplay. So why can’t our thumb connect with the "X" button to skip them? It’s like a lap dance in LA: no touching but we have to keep watching, because we might miss something crucial…right? We’re cheating ourselves out of the full $60 if we miss any of the experience. What’s the point of rushing anyways? And who cares if we’ve already beat the game five times—there's always a chance we missed something!

In Real Life (IRL): Once you stepped out the front door, you’d have to obsessively stop in your tracks to watch everything that happens around you. That lady getting her Starbucks. The guy trying to flag down a cab. You wouldn't be able to leave until each scene is resolved. By the time you get to the office you’re 57 years old. Heck, it’s not even your office anymore.

Symptoms: You’ve FINALLY completed that difficult bounty hunting mission in Red Dead Redemption. Unfortunately, you accidentally killed the bounty instead of lassoing him. The difference in the monetary reward isn’t that great... but... hell, you reload the game save anyway. The mission has to be done properly. Even if you completed the objective, it wasn’t done to your OCD satisfaction. You don’t even want to reload, but that raspy, whispering voice inside tells you to do it anyways, precious. Or maybe you didn’t kill the boss the "right" way, meaning you don’t get that special drop. Or your honor gets knocked down. Maybe you used an item you didn’t want to. Either way, the effect isn’t that grand in the long run. None of that matters when you have the power to reload.

IRL: A lot of people already do this, it’s called "divorce." The only problem is, you can’t reload your younger self. A cougar dating site is the closest thing, but that’s more of a corrupted game save. And you can’t go to the trendy bars anymore because then you look like that old dude acting just a pedo.

Symptoms: Don’t front like you’ve never done it. What’s the first thing you do once the shrinkwrap is cracked open? Normal people put the game into the console, but not you. You take a look around to make sure no one’s in the room. Then you inhale the glorious, plasticky paper scent that wafts from the new disc and game manual. Oh, it’s soooooo niiiiiiiiiice.

IRL: Come on, it’s not as bad as panty-sniffing, but…oh. Wait. We already have this habit, like when we sniff the inside of a new pair of Jordans. At least that doesn’t get us thrown in jail or dissolve our septum.

Symptoms: You’ve been waiting for months to play Gears of War 3. You told your girlfriend not to call you for eight days after the game release. The game is finally in your 360, and you're ready to jump in, but you can’t just yet. The brightness needs tweaking. The subtitles need to be turned on. Volume also needs to be adjusted a bit. And control sensitivity... that needs major adjustments. You do realize this is a problem that people in the 1600’s could never have imagined would exist, right? They were busy worrying about living past 10 years old and not getting mauled by a wolf on the way to the corn fields.

IRL: Hell, we all know people who have similar rituals. Your dad, for instance. He has to say a prayer before every meal. Just don’t tell him it’s a "habit."

Symptoms: By the gods, we’d rather die before using that precious potion. And using an Elixir? You might as well staple our eyelids to our eyebrows. There’s no way in hell we’re using that Phoenix Down this early in the game. And by the time we reach the final stage, we’ve been forced to leave hundred of discovered items behind because our full item inventory looks like an episode of Hoarders. Don’t even get us started on the trophy/achievement misers.

IRL: Check your Downloads folder. See those thousands of MP3’s and movies festering on your hardrive? You probably haven’t even watched half of those movies. Just because you don’t have to physically wade through a sea of headless baby dolls to get to the bathroom doesn’t mean you’re not hoarding.

Symptoms: You’re worse than a Tiger Mom when it comes to seeing that little "Percent of Game Completed" stat on your game menu. Anything less than 100% means complete failure, punishable by neurotic self flagellation. You’ll navigate back to the most insignificant, inane side mission—that ^%^@# one where you have to jump on rocks and catch a butterfly—to boost that 99.6% completion mark. The only time that it was SORT of worth it was in FFX-2.

IRL: Actually, this would be a perfect "habit" to have in real life. Striving for a 100% completion rate would entail pursuing all of your life goals: getting your MBA, traveling to San Sebastian, opening your own graphic design firm, hooking up with a half Puerto Rican dime, meeting Lou Ferrigno, attaining a pair of signed PE Jordan XI’s…so if you already are this neurotic, be glad. The only downside? You'll probably end up alone.

Symptoms: We were secretly grateful for the lack of towns in FFXIII. Everytime we walked into a new town in an RPG, we were filled with a mixture of excitement and a rush of anxiety. It’s great meeting new useless NPC’s and buying new items, but we absolutely MUST explore every inch of that town before leaving. It doesn’t matter if we can return later…we’ll always have that feeling of having left something behind if we don’t barge into every NPC’s house and raid every single pub and shop.

IRL: When you think about it, it’s some creepy Gestapo behavior to be running around, invading every single building with impunity. Didn’t the commies already do this during the Cold War? We're betting it still goes on today. We're talkin' about you, Syria. So even if you aren’t so neurotic that you’re breaking into every possible building in your city because you don’t want to miss out on something, some dictator is living that dream for you. Kim Jong Il, he's paranoid as hell.

Symptoms: So we just glanced at our PS3 Game Save tab on the XMB and we noticed that we have 50 game saves. We stopped counting after 30, so we don’t know if there’s an actual limit. Most of those saves will never be accessed again. They were merely created because we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to go back if we messed something up. What that's about, we’re not even sure.

IRL: We don’t even know how this would apply in real life. This is one of those weird ticks that only gamers could have. Like steam cleaning the stains off your furry suit after every Furry convention. What other kind of human being could have problems like those?

Symptoms: Modern physics engines have allowed gamers to do even more useless things than ever. Maybe it’s just us, but we have to try and break every damn window, barrel, door, jar, crate, and chair in every level. Prone to violence? Not us...

IRL: You’d be put in a mental institution, for sure. Everywhere you went, you'd leave a wake of destruction. Every Ikea store manager and Glass Store owner would be out for your blood. And then one day, walking around the institution courtyard, you get shanked by a former winery proprietor because of that one time you visited his facilities and broke open all of his wine barrels with a crowbar. Your tombstone would read: Here lays a bull in a china shop.

Symptoms: Everyone does this. Doesn’t matter if it’s a MW3 multiplayer match or a Halo single-player campaign. Even if you just fired one shot out of a sniper rifle and no one was around, you absolutely must reload so you have a fresh mag at ALL times. This nervous tick has gotten us killed more than once. Remember the many times you were fumbling with a fresh mag only to have some jack-off jump out of a bush and knife you in the head?

IRL: You do realize that doing this IRL wastes rounds right? OK, good. Because if everyone in the armed forces did this, entire battlefields and countries would be littered with live ammunition, and no one would win any wars. The entire human race would suck at warfare and the earth’s primary composition wouldn’t be water anymore. But at least there would be peace on earth. Jeez, peace is so boring. Someone load up Halo 3.