Whatever we do reveals ourselves. Perhaps when you're tense, you drink more. Or maybe when you feel under pressure, you start to tidy things up. The pay-off from these activities is, of course, distraction. When you're numbing your nervous system with Tequila, or making sure all your collars are absolutely perfectly ironed, or singing with your girfriends in the pub, you can forget about your other problems for a while. And now, along with traditional distractions such as reading, television, and over-eating, we can add gaming into the mix.

Before all the people like me who love games get defensive and flame me with comments about not all gamers being miserable shut-ins with emotional problems, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He was the epitome of metropolitan chic: had a high-flying job at an important magazine, a beautiful girlfriend who worked in a smart media job, a great apartment, lots of friends, and he hobnobbed with the great and the good. Both he and his partner were doing fine, until they developed a little problem, a little dependency. They got hooked on Tetris (I know, it's not exactly World of Warcraft, but that's the point.) They both played the game obsessively, late into the evening, and then were tired and miserable at work, and so they took a Friday off, and then a Monday off, and before you knew it was like something out of Trainspotting: they were home, in their little world, playing. Eventually my friend realised they had a problem. They got counselling. They don't play Tetris anymore, but once the coloured blocks stopped falling they did split up.

I don't want to trot out the arguments about whether gaming is or can be addictive, or have the other discussion about the difference between chemical addiction and habit-forming problems. Who cares? I think you can use almost anything in an unhealthy way: crossword puzzles are great, but if you lose your job and your friends because you're spending ten hours a day doing crossword puzzles, the nature of crosswords isn't really the issue. The issue is the nature of people, who are amazingly flexible in the strategies they adopt to avoid dealing with painful problems. The issue is what you are feeling and why you are behaving compulsively.

What I notice in myself is that at several key times in my life, on one occasion when I was waiting for about a month to discover if I'd got a new job, and at another when a relationship I was in was about to end, video games appeared as a way to keep me focused on a problem I could solve while I waited for the problem I couldn't solve to play itself out. This meant marathon sessions playing Doom and Command & Conquer, late into the night, eyes blurring, fingers cramping. If you had tapped me on the shoulder and said, "What are you doing?" I would have said, "I'm playing a game, leave me alone." What I was also doing was escaping a complicated, hard-to-resolve situation in the real world for the comforting, bounded realm of a rules-based gaming world.

I don't think in either case it was a terrible strategy: cheaper than gambling, better for my liver than binge-drinking. In both cases I was using gaming as a coping strategy for a short-term problem that had a distinct sense of deadline about it (a job to win, a partner with a plane ticket.) If games hadn't been around I might have used some other strategy, like feverishly re-reading the complete works of Patrick O'Brian or staging a marathon screening of The West Wing on DVD.

What I would say to you if you play games a lot is: can you admit that there may be times when you're not playing the game – but in fact the game is playing you? When you weren't logging on to have fun in World of Warcraft, but were logging off to avoid problems in World of Lifecraft? You'll never admit to a non-gamer that these were problems because it gets so boring having to defend the whole idea of gaming from people who've never understood how much fun it can be and how much energy, wit and intelligence there is within the world of gaming. Why add to the dreary pile of anti-gaming nonsense?

Yet at the same time, games don't get a pass: if you can abuse crossword puzzles or Tetris, you can abuse just about anything. Game characters may have superhuman strength and infinite lives, but gamers don't. I'd be interested to hear from people who can put their hands up and say, "Actually, that summer of Everquest wasn't really about play. It was about work. I just hated my job and didn't know what to do about it." I think games are too much fun to waste on anything but good times. Play nice!

---

Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk