I am struggling with this question. In the RPGaDay set up there are alternative questions in case you don’t like a particular question and I nearly plucked one of them out instead.
I have been gaming since I was about 13 or possibly 14 years old. I have never stopped. I gamed at school both literally, in lunch breaks, and during my school years. At college I found a new group to game with and I still migrated back to my home town and gamed with my school group.
After college I found a group of roleplayers where I worked and introduced them to RM and that was the last time I played D&D, probably 1993 and I think it was 2nd edition. I still migrated back to my home town to play with my school years group.
It was in the early 1990s that I discovered PBP which was snailmail back then and in 1993 I discovered dial up bulletin boards which allowed for daily updates or sometimes even more frequent updates. We used to download a text document, type out your characters actions and then upload it to the board to post each move.
That has turned into web based/forum based games. I pretty much game at least for a couple of minutes every day. That is on top of writing games, writing about games, writing adventures and blogging.
I do not think gaming changed me in so much as it is an integral part of me and has been since those important formative years. Gaming is not the be all and end all of everything for me, I am also a serious company director, and I compete at an international level in currently two sports but if things go well that will be three sports although one of them is as a ‘veteran’. I have a family, dogs and horses all of which take up a lot of my life. I am not one of those people who can only express themselves though their gaming or their social circle is entirely made up of gamers.
So I don’t think gaming has changed me or if it did it did it so long ago that I was not mature enough to notice the change. So that is my far from satisfactory answer.