The realization that the cawing of crows alerted wolves to his presence. Or the time he managed to kill three wolves using tainted meat, a spear trap and his entire quiver of arrows. Or his encounters with the grizzly bears, far quicker and meaner than he'd anticipated. He also told me of the few times he'd seen the elusive white wolf, only for it to slink away into the wilds of the night. Hands clasped around a cup of warm tea, tightening with each account, Stephen morphs into a hyper-analytical master woodsman, discussing the intricacies of his survival as if my future, imaginary life in the wild of America depended on it. Suddenly he's a disseminator of arcane bushcraft.

It's not until he starts discussing those systems, though, that the extent of the game's hold over Stephen is revealed. Foregoing any staid, academic discussion of how he bested them or the challenges they posed, he launches into account after account of what went down in the game world.

From the biological simulacra to the digital fauna, Stephen describes these interconnected systems as if they were hewn directly from their real life counterparts. His obsession over failures in the game reflects this. Even when he quit, returned to the desktop and shut the computer down, the game maintained some gravitational pull, difficult to dislodge from his thoughts.

"I'd lie awake for hours trying to work out where did I go wrong. Why did it happen to me? I was reviewing in my mind exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it. I would die on a rapid, say, after having hit three rocks because I hadn't pulled in at a previous place where I could have got some remedial works done to the raft. I was a bit weak but I thought I'll just mosey on down to the next place because I want to get some food.

"And then the rapids came along and it started raining and I didn't control the raft as I should have done, and I didn't just hit one or two or three sets of rocks but at speed I hit a fourth one as well. That was one too many. No matter what I did, I couldn't avoid it." Stephen, though, remains remarkably level-headed about the challenges he faced. Delivered with a clean rationality, he's quick to stress the failure was his fault, not the games (if we can discount the river-ending bug). This was a world and a set of skills and rules that he had bought into, almost totally.