Games and Doing Things

Listening to the 4 Color Rebellion podcast, one of the subjects of
discussion was "Games Making You Want To Do Things" and I found lots of
ways to relate.

When I think of reading, my love for video games got me into reading all
sorts of magazines and literature. Getting online later in life, game
websites take up a good 75 percent of all my online reading. Or should I
just say "reading". Now some websites, even ones with paid editors, are
still littered with bad typo errors and grammatical mistakes. It's the
nature of the online publishing beast. You type it, no one really reviews
it, and it's there for everyone to see. Using Bloglines as an aggregated
reader, I see each version of every article websites post, so I see all
the edits. Then there are also websites like Penny Arcade that voice
elegant and technically challenging writing for us gamers to flounder in.
Tycho has been describes as a "lexiconnoisseur." It's like reading one of
those dictionary-a-day calendars. As far as books go, Halo was the only
game that made me read a book. Once I finished one, I realized that my
reading preferences lie deep with in the geek genre. I had already owned
the Lord of the Rings books, the Hobbit, iRobot, and rebought a childhood
favorite, the Wizard of Earthsea.

Now in other areas I won't be able to claim such real-world benefits from
games. It's more the other way around. Now I want games that emulate what
I do in real life but allow me to extract those urges of reckless
abandonment and pay just the small price of losing a life. It's not that I
needed a video game to tell me what a guardrail feels like at twice the
legal limit, it's more like I want to see what it would have looked like
on the evening news. Or Maximum Exposure. Of course, there is also the
physcial aspect of gaming. I don't mind that polygons made to look like me
can throw a football 80 yards, but it would be nice if I could throw half that
distance for a couple hours without needing some sort of creme that same
evening.

Also, my insesant, sometimes referred to as "gay", organizational habits
carry over into my games. Only my lack of time to actually play games has
kept me from figuring out every single secret in New Super Mario Brothers,
something I would have done multiple times over 15 years ago as a kid,
without cheat book. Then there's Animal Crossing, a game that almost had
me knee deep in town wide yard work. Ughh...

So what have games made you do?