Hi. My name is Phil and I'm addicted to video games.

My relationship with my father is to blame. Back in the 1970s, when I was growing up, video games were starting to appear in the arcades. 'Pong' was all the rage - a simple electronic version of table tennis. My father, a computer engineer, built us a version that we could play on our TV. My descent into addiction had begun.

My problems accelerated when home computers began to emerge. In 1981, my father purchased a BBC Microcomputer with a mere 32 kilobytes of memory. Roughly 8000 times less than the minimum needed to play today's games, at the time it was a revelation. It permitted more sophisticated games, and the use of colour.

Many were conversions of games that were already classics in the arcades: Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Defender. Most were non-violent, or involved violence directed at non-humans: aliens, ghosts, monsters and the like. All were incredibly addictive.

The action games lured me on with the promise of a high score or a new level, testing my visual acuity and hand-eye co-ordination.

The black and white, text-based adventure games tested my puzzle-solving ability. Some mornings I'd rise at 7 a.m. to play them. When I didn't have a store-bought game to play, I programmed my own. One was published in a national magazine. It's no coincidence that I work in software development today.

As I grew older I was able to shake off the video game obsession for a while. But its legacy stayed with me. I exchanged those old text-based adventure games for Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. Pens, paper, a group of friends, and several voluminous rulebooks replaced our ageing home computer.

Fantasy role-playing games appealed to my sense of adventure: slaying dragons, searching for treasure and fighting epic battles. Running the games for my friends required a vivid imagination to describe the world to them and quick thinking to respond to their actions. When I didn't have a store-bought adventure for us to play, I wrote my own. One was published in a national magazine. It's no coincidence that I still love to write today.

It was at university that the boundaries between reality and the games began to blur. I joined the Wychwood Warriors, a Dark Age battle re-enactment society.

Every Sunday afternoon I'd dress in period costume, grab a dull sword and a shield, and fight my fellow students. I even spent nine months building my own suit of chain mail using 60,000 spring washers.

For a few years after starting work, I managed to live game- and computer-free. I deliberately avoided getting a computer at home. I knew that if I did, I'd be unable to stop myself returning to the games. I thought I'd finally kicked the habit. But five years ago, I suffered a relapse. In the intervening years, the games had become even more realistic, with fully rendered, three-dimensional worlds. They had become simulations, providing what books and movies could not: an immersive, interactive experience.

For the first time it was possible to imagine you really were an Allied soldier storming the beaches of Normandy; a Formula 1 racing car driver; the pilot of an F16 or of a starship plying the depths of interstellar space. Their attraction lay not only in their stunning graphics and compelling stories, but in their ability to provide experiences and challenges unavailable in the real world.

With the advent of the Internet, it became possible to explore these virtual worlds alongside my friends. The massively-multiplayer online role-playing games that emerged were the apotheosis of their pen-and-paper ancestors: vast, online worlds of towering mountains, ancient forests and fearsome monsters, populated by thousands of real people bound together in a unique mythos far removed from the humdrum of daily life.

Games had also become more explicitly violent. The effects of violent video games have been debated ever since the 1976 release of the arcade game Death Race 2000, in which you scored points for running over stick figures with your car.

Some people claim that those who play these games become desensitised to violence and are more likely to commit violent acts in the real world. They cite studies that interpret a correlation between video game playing and real-world violence to mean that the former causes the latter. They remind us that those who committed the Columbine high school massacre were fans of the game Doom.

Of course, these are valid concerns. I've often had to fight the urge to commit a drive-by shooting because it was fun when I did it last night in Grand Theft Auto. All those kids who used to play cops and robbers in the school playground probably turned into mass-murderers too.

My name is Phil and I'm addicted to video games. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Phillip Wells

www.limeyinbermuda.com