In this series IGN Editors explain the reasons they are obsessed by certain games, and how those games appeal to their own personalities and circumstances.

I have been in therapy for a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and depression for years. I have tried medication, exercise, eating right, and while they all help, there's nothing that gets me through the day better than playing the games I love.

Build+it.+Destroy+it.

In my life there have been times when a combination of disproportioned brain chemicals and failing interpersonal relationships have coalesced into particularly bad episodes. Games have helped me stay in control, they have kept me from losing it.For many of us, escaping into another world is gaming's big appeal. But for me it was especially therapeutic and valuable. There have been times when I believed that hanging out in my own head was dangerous, and games provided an escape, certain games, in particular.The hours I spent in World of Warcraft, for instance, helped a lot. Staying up until the crack of dawn and losing myself in an experience that was all-consuming allowed me to shut down a lot of my deeper thought processes. I realize that escapism can be a way of avoiding real psychological work, but it helped get me through the worst of times. It's a lot less self-destructive than many of the other options available to people in my position.But there are similarities between obsessively playing games and taking those other destructive paths to 'escape'. There comes a point when playing a game to avoid real life ceases to be fun.Eventually you find yourself relying on this other world to make yourself numb, to avoid a painful confrontation with your inner demons that could ultimately result in a greater sense of freedom,. For me, this happened with WoW, and more recently with Minecraft Like WoW, Minecraft Minecraft has provided me with more room for creative expression than almost any other game I've played, letting my LEGO-loving inner-child come out and create whatever comes to mind. Arriving home every night left me wondering what I had to gather to complete the structure in my mind's eye, and even my daytime hours were haunted by thoughts of collecting and building pixelated blocks.I played alone when I first got into Minecraft. In this barren landscape my character had no one to rely on, no one to talk to, and no one to ask the hard-to-answer question, "How are you doing?" I could become emotionally numb, yet end the night fulfilled because I accomplished something that felt tangible.Somehow also having my mind constantly occupied -- there's always something else to do in Minecraft; crops need to be sowed, defenses built and caves explored – also kept the intrusive, overwhelmingly negative thoughts about my life stored away in my head. Don't get me wrong, I know I have it nice in many ways (I write about games, have an awesome cat, and family and friends who love me), but depression and other mental illnesses make it easy to lose sight of that.Minecraft also presented a special sort of pleasure for me. Part of the reason I've adopted a "whatever happens, happens" attitude with games is because the idea of being able to redo things over and over again can be overwhelming when my mind often demands perfection. With Minecraft, though, nothing is permanent. If I build a tower that I end up hating, I can just knock it down in a matter of minutes. Failure, something almost all of us hate when we play games, becomes an enjoyable challenge to overcome. When I was trying to build an epic dragon that spewed lava, I accidentally poured the lava in such a way it set fire to the forest I had spent days growing. But instead of feeling utterly heartbroken, I laughed, took screenshots of the madness, and set forth to put out the fires and rebuild. The death of the forest in another game might have made me quit out of frustration, but in Minecraft it meant that land was now open for me to let my imagination fly.Eventually even Minecraft's appeal started to wane. The creative outlet was nice, but I think it boiled down to the fact that I was trying to escape an intense, sometimes irrational sense of loneliness by losing myself in a world where I was alone. Less and less of my time was spent chipping away at blocks in Minecraft, and more of it was spent playing multiplayer games like League of Legends where I could hear another human voice.How I played Minecraft changed when my friend Steve invited my friends and I join his server, though. Suddenly Minecraft became something I didn't have to do by myself – though often we still spend hours without speaking to one another . The dynamic I had with the game changed as we started founding villages together, working on joint projects and putting our lives on the line together exploring monster-filled caves. Coming home at the end of the day was less about zoning out in utter silence, and more about embracing friends I don't normally get to see, who I could toil together with. I know it's not the same as spending time together in person, but it's a decent substitute; it actually felt akin to being a kid again, sitting around a pile of LEGO.

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The hard thing about starting a new Minecraft world is overcoming the fear about abandoning all my effort. Sure, no one other than your few friends got to see your epic monuments to your solitude, but in effect you're leaving behind hours of work. I could always go back to the worlds I've left behind, but the truth is that I don't see much of a point. Coming back to them is like stumbling upon the ruins of a lost civilization; I stare at them in awe of what was accomplished, but I don't rebuild or add onto them.Starting again in my friend Steve's world was hard enough, but we decided to make the move again when my other friend Brian built a computer just to run a Minecraft server for us. I suppose we could have transferred the world we were working on to the new computer, but it just felt better to slash and burn. I think that, particularly for a person with OCD, it can be somewhat cathartic to just leave everything half-finished, never to return.I know that when Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3 release I'll go to them when I want a few hours of gaming to myself, but for the times when I want to "see" some long-distance friends, I have Minecraft. An often buggy pre-release of a game has made 2011 a better year. I may not always have control over what happens to my person and brain day-to-day, but in this strange world of blocks I am the master of my destiny, able to wipe out all my wrongdoings at the whim. I can obsess all day about things I wish I had done differently, playing them over and over in my mind, but only in a title like Minecraft can I literally wipe them away and start again. I'll always have therapy, pills and a support group to help me when times are rough, but for now Minecraft is the best medicine for what ails me.When Anthony isn't busy building transcontinental railroads you can ask him questions on his Twitter.