Gamer's Autobiography
(I originally had this posted to a Google Site, but decided to take it down. Now it's here instead.)
This is a rather long post about my history as a gamer, hence the title, "Gamer's Autobiography." The Early Days and Teen Years sections I wrote about seven years ago, the rest I editted or added today.
The Early Days
My gaming life started when I was a child. I discovered quickly that I enjoyed board games when I was young, and Candy Land and The Game of Life were two of my favorite pastimes. When I was five we got an NES, in the year 1988, and I just as quickly fell in love with video games. While at that time I spent more time watching my parents playing the games than playing them myself (my mother playing Tetris or Dr. Mario, my father playing Super Mario Bros., the Guardian Legend or Legend of Zelda), I was entranced by color, sound and sheer enjoyability for both player and observer. My uncle introduced me to Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, my first RPG, though I didn't realize it, and it became a game that years later I would search for to experience once again.
We had a subscription to Nintendo Power, and I was mostly ignorant to other systems at the time (the Sega Master system being its primary contemporary). After the Super Nintendo was released, I remember the disappointment I felt that our Nintendo Powers were no longer doing articles on games we had, or even games on the system we had. After the SNES had been out for a while, my parents finally picked one up. Unfortunately, I can no longer remember how old I was at the time, so I don't know what year that was. I do know that my brother, who is five years younger than I, probably can't remember life without the SNES, like I barely remember not having the NES.
The Teen Years
My father, brother and I played video games the most at this time. My dad beat the Donkey Kong Country series on SNES, which both my brother and I also played. My brother really got into adventure games, and he beat both A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening faster than I, and I discovered a love for collecting games after getting my hands on my first Pokemon game, although my little brother definitely competed with me with when I had Pokemon Red and he had Blue.
Falling in Love with RPG's
My Secret of Gaia Quest
We rented a lot of video games for our SNES from our local Hollywood Video. Two that I will always remember is renting Secret of Mana and Illusion of Gaia. Secret of Mana I did get to play, and it's the first game that I wanted for myself. It remains, to this day, my all time favorite video game. Illusion of Gaia I didn't get to play when we rented it, and neither did my dad! As the only RPG game I've seen my mom play so obsessively, it captured me because I wanted to experience the joys of a game that I'd have never expected my mom to play. In retrospect, I realize that Illusion of Gaia was an RPG that relied heavily on puzzles as plot devices, making it a good game to draw my mom into the genre. After getting my own copy of Secret of Mana for my birthday one year, I restarted my quest to find Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, which neither Faria nor Ultima: Exodus could replace in my mind.
Playing with the Boys at the Table
Meanwhile, I was now in middle school, and as always, having trouble connecting with my peers. In my home-ec class I started hanging out with a group of boys that included one of my neighbors. They played Dungeons & Dragons, and invited me to play with them. I was thrilled, especially since I really didn't have any other friends yet.
Like all middle school D&D games I've ever heard of, we did very twinky things while I was learning the system, like roll every d6 we had to play with to determine stats with the three highest results (my first several characters had no stat lower than 15). I really enjoyed my voyage into this "new" world of gaming, but my mom was worried I'd get involved with Satanic cults. It was difficult to convince her that the worst thing my friends and I did was not fit in with the rest of the school populace.
The Next Level of RP
I briefly got involved with roleplaying in chatrooms when I was thirteen, but did not keep at it very long. I don't remember anymore why I stopped, perhaps the room I was visiting at the time disappeared, which was probably commonplace in 1996. I didn't play much D&D after the 7th grade, mostly because I changed schools. I did continue my love affair with video games during the 8th and 9th grade, but the story really picks up again with my sophomore year of high school.
Two important things happened that year in my gaming life. The first is that I reconnected with a friend of mine from middle school, who had not played D&D with me, but now introduced me to Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM was the system I played most regularly for the following ten years.
The second important event is that the guy I started dating towards the end of the school year lent me Final Fantasy 3 on the SNES (as we now all know was actually Final Fantasy VI in Japan). While to this day I still haven't completed it, or any other Final Fantasy game, I plan to fix that someday because as a series the FF games are some of the best RPG's on the market.
Twice before my 18th birthday, the young man who introduced me to V:tM got me a ride out to the mod-dot LARP he played Saturday nights. It was called Seattle by Choice at the time. After turning 18 I started dating an older man who also attended the game, and he brought me to it every weekend until we broke up just after my 19th birthday. I continued mangaging to get to Seattle by Choice, and for the next 9 months stayed at the home of other gamers in Seattle, which included some people I was dating outside of game.
During My Twenties
Getting to game when I was 20 was difficult, for several months I had to get a ride from someone going to and from game from the town my parents were living in (although I only stayed at their house when I didn't have anywhere else to stay, I'd moved out when I was 17). A month and a half before my 21st birthday I moved to Seattle's University district, which put me in walking distance to the game for the six and a half months I lived there. When I moved out of that place, it was because I was moving in with one of the assistant storytellers for Vampire at Seattle by Choice, who I was now dating, and so came to game with him. The game's name was changed to Emerald Chronicles, the vampire sphere specifically Emerald City Chronicles.
I continued to attend Emerald City Chronicles, and sometimes the Mage sphere (Emerald Chantry Chronicles, I believe) until I left the state of Washington in 2009. Overall, that would be over eight years I spent there as a regular player, primarily in the Vampire sphere. During the summers of 2005 and 2006, I believe, I attended GenCon in Indianapolis and the GenCon LARP, a high powered, multi-sphere White Wolf game using the Mind's Eye Theatre system.
In 2005, I started playing MMORPG's. My first was Final Fantasy XI, which I played for several months. I reached level 52 as a White Mage on my Mithra, Tamha, on the Alexander server. In 2006 I tried World of Warcraft for the first time. I played a Troll Shaman named Tamhaskyfire on the Kil'Jaeden PvP server on the account of my boyfriend at the time. I only reached level 25 with her. This was during vanilla, so mounts weren't available until 40. I was so excited when I learned the Spectral Wolf transformation. I did not really enjoy the game at the time, though. Barrens chat was full of trolls, and I don't mean by race; I had to hide from any Alliance characters I saw, since being on a PvP server meant I was fair game; and finally, the guy who asked me to play with him was hardly ever around, and if he was he played on a higher level character working towards the end-game content. I got more enjoyment out of watching my boyfriend do Molten Core raids than I did from playing, and it kept me from going back for four years.
The Sims 2: this is probably one game I've put more hours into than any other game I own. I believe I started playing it at the beginning of 2006, and I've played it off and on ever since. Besides the fact that I've spent more time on it than any other game, this one has another important distinction: it was the first game for which I discovered a modding community. Initially, the idea that the Sims 2 should have a modding community might seem obvious. The game ships with a program named "Body Shop," a tool to create custom clothing, hair and sims for your game. While the custom sim items (as well as homes and household objects) are worth a look, it's the game changing mods that really extend the game's playability. The harsh and infamous More Awesome Than You, home of JM Pescado, focuses primarily on fixing bugs in EA's designs, as well as extending the functionality of the game's systems and mechanics. TwoJeffs, originally hosted on MATY, created his own site called Simbology, and he also focuses on extending the game mechanics and some bugfixing, though not in the same way as JMP. While there are many more sites out there for the Sims 2 (and now 3), these are my first stops when I find something I need fixed or changed in my game. For the Sims 3, my first two stops are Nraas Industries and TFM's Naughty Sims Asylum (which sprang up after The ISZ's Crazy Town was shut down, with much of the same community).
After splitting up with my former Storyteller boyfriend in 2008, I discovered several forums dedicated to roleplaying alternate continuities based on the world of Pern, created by Anne McCaffrey. While it wasn't my first experience with a forum as an RP tool, as SbC and later ECC both had them, as did Clan Dragon, the linkshell I was part of in FFXI, it was the first time I came across forums used for interactive RP that didn't depend on in person or MMO interactions as the primary story catalyst.
Love and Marriage
Remember when I mentioned before that I left Washington in 2009? Well, that was when I got married. I first met my husband at the Vampire LARP, during the days it was Seattle by Choice, and he was one of the household where I'd been dating several of the members when I was nineteen. He was in the Army and stationed in NE Kansas when we wed. While we haven't been able to play a White Wolf game since I've moved here, I did get to play a Shadowrun game for the first time. We were also part of an Epic level D&D game, myself as a player and my husband as the DM, in 2010.
At the urging of some of our D&D group, we decided to try out WoW together. We played from probably June of 2010 through about February of 2011, getting our main characters to level 60 and a couple sets of alts to the thirties. Our friends had us in their guild on the Emerald Dream server, an RP-PvP server. Sadly, they chose the server not because of the RP aspects, but because of minor differences between RP-PvP servers and regular PvP servers. At the urging of one of my many cousins, we also rolled characters on Shadow Council, an RP (PvE) server. While she was excited by the concept of RP, she did not know at the time where to find any. On both servers we played Alliance, as that was what the people we were playing with played. When we stopped, it was over a year before we came back again.
After we stopped playing WoW, my husband introduced me to EVE. This game did have some aspects I really liked, one being that character progression was not affected by the amount of time one spent playing a character, but on how long the character existed. So long as a player remembered to queue up skills to train, the character would continue to progress while the player was offline. The game is frequently referred to as "spreadsheets in space," even by it's own players. The reason for this is because the mechanics of the game can be charted out by a player with a good understanding of the math, or at the very least by third party tools like EVE Mon and PYFA.
When we stopped playing EVE after several months, we decided to play on a public multiplayer server on Neverwinter Nights 2. My husband had been a storyteller for a time on a Neverwinter Nights 1 server, and we hoped a smaller, more dedicated role-playing group would suit us better. We played on the Sundren server for a while, before leaving to play FFXI at my urging. After a couple months of FFXI, we played EVE again for a while. By this time I was pregnant, and we eventually stopped playing online games all together for a while. Shortly after having my daughter, roughly a year after we'd left the first time, we finally returned to Sundren.
Our stay in Sundren ended up being only until May. After one particularly stressful storyline, we felt the need to move on again. We decided to give WoW another shot, hoping that if we played what we wanted without the pressure of others on what server or faction we should play, perhaps we would enjoy the game more. We rolled up a pair of Blood Elves on Shadow Council, mostly because we already had a pair of Night Elves on the server if we ended up sticking with the game. Then, one Saturday night in June, 2012, quite possibly during our first weekend as we were still under level 20, we stumbled into the Arrow's Song. Most of the attendees were in either Kingdom of Quel'Thalas or Bella Morte. We contacted Kharris during the week, and by the following Wednesday we were in the KoQT guild. My husband only played until September of last year, quitting shortly after Mists of Pandaria was released. I am still playing at the moment myself.
Last week I turned thirty. I've been playing video games for almost twenty four years, and roleplaying for eighteen. While I don't think I quite categorize as a "girl" anymore, I am definitely a gamer chick.