It was last night when I realised that I may be taking Red Dead Redemption 2 a little too seriously…

I had just completed a mission – the last one, before going to bed. The mission involved protecting a woman and her boyfriend, by boarding a steam train with them and shooting all the bad guys on horseback, who pursued the locomotive with the intention of killing everyone. Just your typical Monday morning commute from Bath Spa to Bristol Temple Meads.

After disposing of the baddies and safely driving the train to a station (I thought the lead character was a cowboy, not Superman), the grateful woman offers my character a gift to say thank you. The present is a bracelet, which she tells me is a family heirloom. You must then choose whether or not to accept the piece of jewellery. I accepted the bracelet.

Despite the woman continuing to thank me, before leaving and the mission ending (mercifully allowing me to save my progress and go to bed), I felt guilty. That’s right, guilty. Guilty for accepting a gift from an imaginary character in a video game!

What makes my feeling of guilt even more stupid, are the other acts I perform in the game. I do not have a second thought, when it comes to looting shop keepers, blowing the heads off innocent men on horseback and shooting a farmer’s livestock (in my defence, I ate the beef and mutton, I acquired as a result of my crime).

I have been slightly reassured, that while the game has given me faux guilt, many fellow gamers have been affected by RDR2 a lot worse than by some fuss over a bracelet.

Here are a few of my favourite posts from a Reddit forum. The thread in question is titled “This game is NOT good for addictive personalities.”

I’ve been staying up until 2am practically every night since release day, playing the whole day on days off from work.

It seems like every minute I’m at home, I’m playing. I happily trade sleep for more time in-game no matter how early I need to be up for work the next day

Me every weekend: “I’ll only play for like an hour or two honey.”

“Crap it’s 4am”