Welcome to Pipcastle

There are few arenas more forgiving of unbridled acts of narcissism than gaming.

You don’t believe me? Well, I have spent around fifteen years naming things after myself, building monuments to myself, blasting my way around space just to earn respect in dive bars and generally bigging myself up.

The thing that brought all this to my attention was the laughter of friends a couple of weeks ago as they realised my cities in Civ 4 were named variously Pipchester, Pipcastle, Pipbury, Pipton-on-Sea, Little Pipping, Pipstable, Pipham, Pipping Norton,Pipborough, and not forgetting Pipwich.

My self-centeredness reached new heights/depths in the Gamecube iteration of Animal Crossing. I played until my hands were blistered, fishing for red snappers and the like to pay my debt to raccoon slumlord and loanshark Tom Nook. I overtook the progress of all three other town inhabitants within weeks and to celebrate my greatness Tom Nook erected a gold statue of me at the train station.

Oh, and it didn’t stop there. No. I planted a sea of flowers around said statue. And then I finished paying off the mortgages of everyone else just so that when their statues arrived (in metals less wonderful than gold, may I add) I could leave piles of rubbish and old tin cans around them. I believe I may also have changed the floor tiles to say “Pip is great”. Ahem.

So yes, games are great at making me feel like an all-powerful (and occasionally benevolent) dictator but in the name of corporate social responsibility perhaps developers should try to save me from myself just once in a blue moon. That way I could offset all the narcissism via an XBLA venture where instead of earning all the achievements for myself I must pass them on to others.

My name is Philippa and I am a monster.