Top tens (cont.)

Top ten gaming moments of the decade (in chronological order):

1. My earliest young adult memory of obsessive gaming was being glued to my high school boyfriend's computer, surviving on a diet of honey-roasted peanuts and playing Warcraft 3 into the wee hours of the morning. The undead campaign was my hands-down favorite. A love was born.

2. By now, it's a dude-bro cliche, but when Halo first came out, it was a revelation. My senior year of high school, I spent my entire spring break playing through a cooperative campaign with a bunch of college boys in their communal living room, where the occasional Mississippi cockroach the size of a dollar bill would blunder across the carpet and cause a three-minute stomping frenzy. But even that didn't stop us from playing.

3. During a short hiatus between killing aliens and killing demons, I got really into The Longest Journey, a quirky adventure/puzzle game. The fantasy element was okay, but I was really in it for the proto-cyberpunk. Also, I will forever be a sucker for games with hot, spunky female protagonists.

4. Two words: Diablo 2. I started in high school, and in college I got my own Battlenet account. Ever faithful to the unwritten rule that girl gamers play girl characters, I played a sorceress with a badass frost skill tree. My favorite was the jungle level -- probably because this was the year I was taking my first lit theory courses, and I liked that the cute baddies in tribal masks were called fetishes.

5. Quake 3 was just a recreational hobby until my boyfriend downloaded a Tank Girl skin for me. After that, the hours between classes were mainly spent annihilating things with a rocket launcher. It's a wonder I ever got any homework done.

6. Morrowind returned me to immersive role-playing games. I've probably wasted a solid week of my life jumping around Vivec to get my acrobatics up to 100. Again, when in god's name did I find time to read all those Russian novels?

7. If ever anyone has cause to doubt that I am a tremendous dork, I'd like to state for the record that, in college, I was an active member of a Dance Dance Revolution club. To this day, whenever I hear a J-pop song, I still have the urge to perform a combo.

8. Naaaaa na na na na nuh-nuh-nuh Katamari Damacyyyyy!

9. During the inauguration of Barack Obama, I was flipping between televised footage of downtown D.C. and the city's deserted post-apocalyptic doppleganger in Fallout 3, where my character, a pink-haired gunslinger named Precious, was busy blowing the heads off slavers. Truly, an historic occasion.

10. Tie game! I currently love everything about Borderlands, aka Diablo with Guns -- the spunky girl character with the elemental-heavy skill tree, the slash-and-burn looting game concept, the comic-y Mad Max aesthetic. But last night, as I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, I realized that I'd been to that exact plantation. Neato. Also, what a mind-blowingly perfect FEMA allegory. Also also, I still love the undead.