This story amusingly wraps together psychology and the inner self to game playing and what it is you do when you get your hot little hands on a controller.

I really want to nuke Athens.

I know it's possible. Hell, I've watched and rewatched the YouTube videos of the 14-year-olds who've done it in Sid Meier's new game, Civilization Revolution. The guttural roar of the ICBM taking off, the flare of the missile as it arcs slowly across the sky, the terrifying rumble in your Xbox 360 controller as the nuke pulverizes the target: It's awesome. I can't sleep until I've rained that sort of death on the world.

What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at Civilization Revolution that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite. I could, for example, train my country in brilliant artistry, building Wonders of the World -- a "cultural victory," as it's called. Or I could win by becoming a great economic power, enriching my citizens and the global community.

But no. Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, "Hulk smash, Hulk destroy" strategy possible. Or maybe I geek out and try to discover spaceflight before anyone else, so I can outfit my hermetically sealed, glassed-in astronaut city with interstellar warp drives, blur the stars into hyperspace, arrive at Alpha Centauri, encounter alien worlds ... and then try to kill them. Ooooh, you guys back home wanna spend your time carefully building the Hanging Gardens, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Alexandrian Library? Fine. Go for it. Hippies. Me, I'm gonna reach for the goddamn stars, built some kickass mechs, flatten anybody in my way with a molten avalanche of plasma.

Daisy via wired.com »