for my dear roommates. my dear, halo-playing, x-box obsessed roommates. (actually, compared to the holed-up, projectile-vomiting losers in this article, they're practically saints.) via lostremote.

some choice quotes:

>>"I played the first one," she said. "There are weird aliens and they wave their arms above their head when you shoot them and then they run around. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no story, there’s no plot, there’s no background—it’s just ‘save your troop from alien invaders.’ I don’t understand how someone could sit there for eight straight hours and play a video game."

>>"It’s so dorky," said Ms. Griffin, "the most ridiculous form of male bonding I’ve ever witnessed. They just all sit in their own homes in front of the TV with these headsets on, like they’re operators. They turn the volume up, so you can hear them talking to each other. They have teams, and they find other teams to play—kids who play all day, 14-year-olds. They trash-talk with them …. I’m like, ‘Can we do something? Like walk the dog?’"

>>"He works so much," Ms. Deppe said of her Halo-addicted boyfriend. "I let him have his fun when he can." Ms. Deppe said it’s when he plays with his friends—and she comes along for the day—that she begins to feel like a useless appendage, surrounded by chortling man-boys. "When he’s alone, it doesn’t bother me; he plays video games and I paint," she said. "But when he’s with his friends and they play together, I think, ‘Why am I here?’ They make weird faces; their mouths start to hang open a little bit; their heads sort of go back and forth."

>>Mr. Chattoraj, the attorney, described how he used to gorge on Halo when his fiancée went out of town for business. "I would start playing on a Friday night and play until 8:30 the next morning," he said. "It feels like you were out partying. You think, ‘What have I done? I didn’t sleep—I feel sick.’ I’ve actually thrown up from motion sickness because I get too close to the TV—not uncommon with first-person shooter games, because things are moving around and you’re ducking and jumping, but you’re really just sitting in one place. Kathy had a friend over—they were in the living room, and I was in the bedroom—and the friend was leaving. She poked her head in, and I had total tongue sweat. As soon as she left, I ran into the bathroom and projectile-vomited."

>>Mr. Clute’s girlfriend lives in California, and he said he would never ditch her for Halo. On the other hand, "maybe she’d just play the video games with me," he said. "But then she’d want to have sex or something, and that would get in the way." He laughed at himself. In the background, one could hear piercing cries, something to the effect of "Why won’t you just die?"