Please Help Me

People say you can't bring yourself to ask for help until you know you've hit rock bottom. I know what that feels like now. I have a problem. I'm trapped in a repeating behavior that can't be good for me and there's nothing I can do to break out of the spiral.

Try as I might, I cannot stop playing Fallout 3 on my Xbox.

This game was a Christmas gift, and for months it did little more than collect dust. I kept hearing about what a complete world the game created, and how detailed the environments were, and how you could sit down and intend to play for thirty minutes or so and then realize that the entire night has passed by and you did not sleep.

Imagine yourself wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, trying to solve a mystery and complete random missions you encounter along the way, all the while fighting for your life against a wide variety of irradiated mutant creatures and violent bands of human raiders, mercenaries, and slavers, all ready to kill you off for something as simple as the bottle caps you carry. Or your weapons. Or because they don't like how close you came to the dumpster they are protecting.

And it just goes on and on. Everything indicates there are well over 100 hours of gameplay crammed into this thing, and since I am, at the core of my person, little more than a grown-up version of the thirteen-year-old who could drop $12 playing video games at Aladdin's Castle without thinking twice about it, it's not like I can just put the controller down without seeing what happens next.

After awhile, the game begins to permeate my thinking. I'm afraid to turn on the bathroom sink because of the radiation I'm sure the water will contain. I approach ATM machines carefully because I think that entering an incorrect password will lock me out and send angry robots after me. I expect to hear Three Dog's wasteland survival tips whenever I turn on a radio. When I walk out to the mailbox, I'll stare at the ground the whole way, just to make sure I don't trip any frag mines. When I take the dog outside, I'll scout angles around the corners of my house, finding the best way I could take out a Super Mutant Brute with my VATS engaged, and wondering how close I would have to let this nine-foot-tall-Shrek-looking freak before I could switch to my laser rifle....

Like I said, I have a problem.