Some twelve odd years ago, a teenage boy awoke from his slumber early one saturday morning and ambled into his kitchen for breakfast. Distracted by sounds of life from the living room, he frowned and walked cautiously towards the source of the noise, only to discover his ten year old cousin visiting from Karachi was still playing his Gameboy. Grudgingly, he admitted what, to his young cousin who was in awe of his "coolness" was a supreme compliment, that she was crazier about videogames than any boy he's ever met.

Yesterday, a teenage boy stumbled in from a late night trip to a friend's birthday at his farm and heard furious clicking noises from the room across the hall from his own. Tiptoeing towards the source of the hushed noise, he sneaked a peek inside to find his twenty-two year old sister still at her game of Age of Empires 2. Not so grudgingly, he told his sister to get some sleep before her eyeballs popped out of their sockets from exhaustion.

My univeristy and its hectic schedule had nearly made me give up videogames. Once you go off something cold turkey, after a week or two, you just don't get the old itch when you have some time free anymore, which is precisely what was happening these last couple of days. Now that I finally have a week or two to myself, I would eye my games, noncommitedly make a mental note to install them and have a session. And then, I would do something else.

The woman who would sneak into her parent's room at five a.m. on a sunday morning to plug in her Atari and play as quietly as possible, the woman who sat with T during the exams and finished off Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3 in succession, the woman who would head straight for the CD stands at Sunday Bazaar while sis would go off to look at all the interesting jewellery available, was the woman who simply did not "feel like" playing a videogame.

Yesterday, though, I decided to install Age of Empires 2 at last. When I finally got around to clicking on that familiar old icon with the badly drawn knight's helmet, it all came back in a rush. An overdose of reality is about as bad as an overdose of fantasy.