Why all the fuss about gaming?

Believe it or not, yesterday was the first time I ever played LAN games in a game parlour. The gaming bug, which has deeply infected Puneites, was comparitively unknown in Nashik. Hence I never got a chance to try gaming during my stay in Nashik. I had lots of chances to make up for that during my stay at the hostel in Pune as most of my friends were total gaming addicts. However it never appealed much to me. But finally when my friends went to a game parlour & insisted that I join them just to see how the experience is, I just couldn't say no. The parlour we went to was a pretty cool place. All the computers had LCD screens, the ambience was nice & the chairs were really comfortable. And it had almost all the games, from FIFA 06 to NFS Most Wanted to GTA San Andreas. We played a few games of NFS MW to begin with & I thought 'Hey it's not that bad after all'. But then suddenly my friends decided that they'd had enough of NFS & loaded the one game that has captured the imagination of all gamers worldwide - Counter Strike. And all hell was let loose. There were 4 of us, that made two teams of two. Before the game started, we were good friends, but once it started we were sworn enemies. Battle cries filled the room. "Come on, what are you doing?", "Give me cover", "Dont drop the bomb", "Look behind you", "Shit, he got me" & many more unprintable ones. I've never seen my friends so totally engrossed in anything as they were in playing CS. Nothing could take their attention away from the game. They played with such intensity as if their lives depended upon the dumb game. I just hope that terrorists worldwide do not take their jobs as seriously as the terrorists in CS. I played with them for about an hour or so. And then I had had enough. I just quit the game and told my friends that we should leave. But it's amazing how CS not only grips the mind but also the ears - they just couldn't hear me !! So I decided to play FIFA 05 on my comp. And that too against the comp, as there was nobody on LAN whom I could play against. So that's what I ended up doing in a LAN games parlour - playing a two player game against the CPU. Imagine paying 20 bucks an hour for that. Soon the torture came to an end, not because of a lack of interest but because of a lack of cash. My friends couldn't believe that 3 hours were already over, they even checked their watches twice to be sure. And then they gave me an _expression that said, "Three hours, so soon? I never felt the time fly by". And all I could say was, "It was about bloody time you came out". And so we left the game parlour after three hours of extreme boredom for me & total fun for the others. And despite all this I could still not understand, why all this fuss about gaming?? What do you get out of it? The answer, it seems, shall always elude me. But all I can say that if anybody catches me playing CS in a game parlour again - they can shoot me. It will relieve me of the burden of playing the dumb game.