Tom Bissell didn't regard Niko Bellic as a friend.
They weren't close, like friends who lament bad fantasy football picks over a pint of beer at a local bar.
For one thing, Niko was pixelated, forever stuck as the lead character in the jagged world of Grand Theft Auto IV, but somehow, the sin-drenched reality he could never escape resonated with Bissell, who controlled Niko's every move.
"Niko was not my friend, but I felt for him, deeply," Bissell wrote in an article published in The Guardian. "He was clearly having a hard go of it and did not always understand why. He was in a new place that did not make a lot of sense. He was trying, he was doing his best, but he was falling into habits and ways of being that did not reflect his best self."
Bissell "met" Niko — the playable protagonist of Rockstar North's 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV — the same night he was re-introduced to cocaine. A friend told Bissell he wanted to celebrate GTA IV's release with an "extra sweetener."
The combination of cocaine and video games spurred a four-year binge.
"I played through Grand Theft Auto IV again and again after that," Bissell wrote. "The game was faster and more beautiful while I was on cocaine, and breaking laws seemed even more seductive. Niko and I were outlaws, alone as all outlaws are alone, but deludedly content with our freedom and our power."
The freedom of jumping, slashing, car-thieving single-player games intertwined with the chaos of his life, but offered an addictive escape from it, too.
"Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure," Bissell wrote.
Bissell is the author of "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter," in which he explores the grip and the art of video games and the rushing tide of future developments.
But in the book published in 2011, he also explains the monopolizing frenzy of cocaine that seduced his dark side, propelling him into a fantastical world that urged just one more mission.
Like his obsession with video games, Bissell's experimentation with cocaine eventually turned into an obsession similar to video games. The fixations entwined, birthed from the moment Bissell picked up his copy of GTA IV.
It would be a few years of abusing the drug before Bissell freed himself from it, and while that period coincided with hours-long gameplay sessions, he doesn't regret the experience of playing, nor the memories it created.
"What have games given me? Experiences," he writes. "Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something."
Bissell continued, "Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough."