The Psychological Impact of Doom

For the past few months I have been playing a PC video game, something that wasn’t normal for me for the longest portion of my life (unless we include Chess, Checkers, and Minesweeper). For a long time I never had any interest in computer games, especially not first person shooters, I considered them to be pointless. Now I find myself drawn to playing an old game that I played many years ago, Doom. Lately through a tool called ZDaemon, I have been playing the old standard Doom and Doom 2 games. In addition I have been playing with some add-on files for those games (WAD files) which extend what the game is capable of and provide new and more interesting game maps. When I originally started playing Doom again I was worried that I might become more aggressive or perhaps more anti-social, but I have noticed lately that it has made me more calm and less easily stressed about things. In addition, I have been playing in “cooperative” mode and have experimented playing with a specifically cooperative WAD. This type of co-dependent team-based game play is something I have never experienced before, but I have found it to be a good way to become closer to a person and begin to understand the cooperative strategies of that person.
I don’t know why I am posting this, I guess it seems like the only major aspect of my life I haven’t written about yet.