I think it started early on, mostly unnoticed at first, weaseling in, incubating quietly in order to one day explode, screaming, through my chest cage with the ravenous voracity of a baby alien.  Because I have ALWAYS played games.  All manners of games.   But the addiction wasn't ever caught until way too late, when it was already deeply entrenched in my bones.   I think the first time I noticed it was during Pikmin, I wasn't even the one playing, just the guy backseat gaming, "go over there!"  "Pick up that key!"   "Well... Just give me the controller then!"      when it suddenly dawned on me, this wasn't a game about enlisting the aid of the pleasantly colored, local midget flower people to help you recover the pieces of a spaceship necessary to return back home.    This was a game about exploiting the aid of the colorful flower people.  I noticed all the timid aliens lined up single file behind our hero.   As he commanded them, one-by-one, to attempt to ford a river.  No big deal, but on the other bank rested two enormous, mushroom spotted monsters, capable of eating our hero, his spaceship and all of his 'friends' in a single sloppy slurp. 
Of course, by this point in time, my natural skill at video games was enough for me to be instantly better than more than a few of my more outdoors-minded peers.  But for the most part, every one who challenged me was spectacularly outclassed.  Like this particular child, for whom the name of which has long since escaped me, but his direct, almost arbitrary method of ordering these sullen eyed servants to their assured doom struck a chord in me.  He was like their slave master, dominating their every actions with his plastic wand of subservience.  And as I thought about it for more than a couple seconds I realized, no, I was not fucked up in my logic.  Because even IF one were to argue that the controller is controlling the character, so everyone's kind of in a master-servant relationship with gaming, there is STILL the fact that in Pikmin, you control a character who is controlling OTHER characters.  There's a theory of mind element at work there.  You can't exploit something you don't understand. 


THIS leads to the further conclusion ( I know, I know, at this moment it feels like I'm dragging you down the rabbit hole like some cheesy movie monster, but bare with me.) that our hero KNOWS these creatures are both intelligent and emotional, but does not care, and approaches the trust of the little creatures the same way a psychopath would approach the trust of a puppy.