It's been almost two weeks since I took leave of my senses and decided to
put my personal life and opinions on public display. It has been an incredibly liberating
and humbling experience. So many of my friends and family have been supportive
in ways I never expected. Complete strangers have said the nicest things to me.
It gives me a sense of deep optimism about this endeavor.
I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself properly, to give my readers context about me and help promote understanding in this flawed media.
My name is Monica and I am at this time a 42 year old woman, who identifies with the gender I was assigned at birth. I am in a committed heterosexual relationship with my husband, Andrew. We have two children, Kate, 10, and Thomas, 6. We are all gamers of some variety or other. Andrew is mostly a table top gamer. Kate and Thomas are mostly electronic gamers, due in part to their earlier inability to read, write and do math, as they get older, they are becoming table top gamers as well. I am quite a bit of both.
I am a direct person, who says things directly. Sometimes it sounds really great in my head, but when it gets out of my head and on paper, well, it is definitely not what I meant to say. I hope that you will give me a chance and try to understand what it is I am actually trying to say. I will never be offended by a person who is trying to convey their message with our inadequate form of communication, coupled with the one dimensional media of the internet. If I say something that is offensive, please ask me to clarify respectfully. It is never my intention to offend or hurt another person. Or at least, not in an off-handed casual way. I have an odd and sarcastic sense of humor. A lot of times the strangest things amuse me and they simply don't make sense outside of my head.
I started my gaming career with Atari's Pong. I'm not sure why my parents bought it, but who cared!? It was great. I quickly became addicted to Atari's Adventure when it became available. I spread my gaming wings at arcades and the bowling alley, where they also had arcade games. I loved Dragon's Lair (thank goodness someone finally posted the game all the way through on Youtube, I never did win), Gauntlet, Spy Hunter and many others. I may have dated a guy who worked at the local arcade for free games. I was young, we all make bad decisions.
I remember when I was a freshman in High School we had a family game night at the school and some of my fellow classmates, all boys, were just sitting around a table, with paper and dice. I was able to find out that they were playing AD&D, although they didn't really seem open to my joining their campaign. Their lack of desire to have me join was all I needed to get myself to the local bookstore and acquire my very own Red Box Edition. Forget those jerks, I didn't need them! I had a younger brother that I could pretty much talk into doing anything at least once.
My guess is we did it all wrong, but we sure had a good time doing whatever it was we were doing. Our table top gaming didn't last very long because we had our Nintendo and we had to figure out all the finishing moves in "Mortal Kombat". We had our priorities. I discovered comic books to supplement my voracious sci-fi and fantasy reading habit at this time as well. Life was good then.
As the years past, I still loved video games. I went on to finish college with a degree in Biology, because Madeleine L'Engle made me do it. I still read fantasy and sci-fi books like a fiend, but table top gaming wasn't something that I was participating in, I didn't really even know where to look for a group had I wanted to.
Then my little brother came to me one day in the mid '90's and said "Hey, there's this game, where you pretend to be vampires, and you dress up and walk around. You want to go with me?!" How could I say "No" to something like that? So, I went and had my first experience in White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade. I met my husband that very first night. I met a lot of people who are still my friends to this day. Gaming changed my life in a very good way.
I found people who all enjoyed a lot of the same kinds of things I liked. We would stay up ridiculously late talking about "personal horror" and what it meant to us. We would see movies together, I was invited to other games, which led to my deep love for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. And pretty much every other line WW had to offer. It was at this time I also discovered CCG's and played in many L5R tournaments, including winning a best of three at Origins. It was pretty awesome. Unicorn Clan rocks, who doesn't love running down their enemies on horseback?
My husband also had a deep fondness for D&D, so we added it to our regular rotation. When we discovered we were expecting our first child, we had a sit down, heart to heart talk about how maybe "personal horror" wasn't the kind of game we should be playing where our young, impressionable children might overhear us. We moved our WW books to the shelves and moved more firmly into 3.0 then 3.5.
It was a sad day when WoTC announced that they were thinking about going to 4.0, but they didn't know what they were really going to do. They waffled around. They stopped having Paizo publish Dungeon and Dragon. I still really miss those publications, that's where I discovered Wil Wheaton wasn't a jerk, after all, but a really cool gamer dad, who knew? And on and on, WoTC seemed lost. So, we waited, along with all the good people at Paizo and when they decided they were going to take the proverbial bull by the horns, we hopped on the bull with them and what a ride it was.
In the end, we had a shiny new Pathfinder and WotC was left in our dust. I have never once regretted our decision to go with the company that was open, honest and truly loved their fans. I was astonished at how respectful of their audience they were and genuinely interested in what we had to say. It was refreshing. It is has been our weekly game of choice here since 2008.
Even more time has passed and now we have two children. We recently funded Monte Cook's Numenera Kickstarter which was just magic to watch happen. We have enjoyed a whole new system of RP that is less crunchy and much easier to help bring our children to the table. Reading, writing and math aren't quite the struggle they once were and they have such creative minds, I love to watch them learn and think things through. It's fun to be a part of their problem solving process. Gaming has opened up a lot of topics of conversation that would never come up organically.
During all of this I was meeting new and interesting people. People who were not like me in many ways, but drawn together because of our hobby. People who were different ethnicity, sexual orientations, religions, and heaven only knew what, but they were all people and for the most part, really good people.
Gaming has given me opportunities that I have not gotten anywhere else. I learned more about myself pretending to be other people than I thought imaginable. I learned more about other people than I could have ever done at home. I traveled, experienced new places and new ways of thinking and seeing things. I found a community of diverse and beautiful people. I want to give back to them and I want to celebrate who they are, so here we are, you, me and everyone else working toward Maximized Empowerment.
I am a direct person, who says things directly. Sometimes it sounds really great in my head, but when it gets out of my head and on paper, well, it is definitely not what I meant to say. I hope that you will give me a chance and try to understand what it is I am actually trying to say. I will never be offended by a person who is trying to convey their message with our inadequate form of communication, coupled with the one dimensional media of the internet. If I say something that is offensive, please ask me to clarify respectfully. It is never my intention to offend or hurt another person. Or at least, not in an off-handed casual way. I have an odd and sarcastic sense of humor. A lot of times the strangest things amuse me and they simply don't make sense outside of my head.
I started my gaming career with Atari's Pong. I'm not sure why my parents bought it, but who cared!? It was great. I quickly became addicted to Atari's Adventure when it became available. I spread my gaming wings at arcades and the bowling alley, where they also had arcade games. I loved Dragon's Lair (thank goodness someone finally posted the game all the way through on Youtube, I never did win), Gauntlet, Spy Hunter and many others. I may have dated a guy who worked at the local arcade for free games. I was young, we all make bad decisions.
I remember when I was a freshman in High School we had a family game night at the school and some of my fellow classmates, all boys, were just sitting around a table, with paper and dice. I was able to find out that they were playing AD&D, although they didn't really seem open to my joining their campaign. Their lack of desire to have me join was all I needed to get myself to the local bookstore and acquire my very own Red Box Edition. Forget those jerks, I didn't need them! I had a younger brother that I could pretty much talk into doing anything at least once.
My guess is we did it all wrong, but we sure had a good time doing whatever it was we were doing. Our table top gaming didn't last very long because we had our Nintendo and we had to figure out all the finishing moves in "Mortal Kombat". We had our priorities. I discovered comic books to supplement my voracious sci-fi and fantasy reading habit at this time as well. Life was good then.
As the years past, I still loved video games. I went on to finish college with a degree in Biology, because Madeleine L'Engle made me do it. I still read fantasy and sci-fi books like a fiend, but table top gaming wasn't something that I was participating in, I didn't really even know where to look for a group had I wanted to.
Then my little brother came to me one day in the mid '90's and said "Hey, there's this game, where you pretend to be vampires, and you dress up and walk around. You want to go with me?!" How could I say "No" to something like that? So, I went and had my first experience in White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade. I met my husband that very first night. I met a lot of people who are still my friends to this day. Gaming changed my life in a very good way.
I found people who all enjoyed a lot of the same kinds of things I liked. We would stay up ridiculously late talking about "personal horror" and what it meant to us. We would see movies together, I was invited to other games, which led to my deep love for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. And pretty much every other line WW had to offer. It was at this time I also discovered CCG's and played in many L5R tournaments, including winning a best of three at Origins. It was pretty awesome. Unicorn Clan rocks, who doesn't love running down their enemies on horseback?
My husband also had a deep fondness for D&D, so we added it to our regular rotation. When we discovered we were expecting our first child, we had a sit down, heart to heart talk about how maybe "personal horror" wasn't the kind of game we should be playing where our young, impressionable children might overhear us. We moved our WW books to the shelves and moved more firmly into 3.0 then 3.5.
It was a sad day when WoTC announced that they were thinking about going to 4.0, but they didn't know what they were really going to do. They waffled around. They stopped having Paizo publish Dungeon and Dragon. I still really miss those publications, that's where I discovered Wil Wheaton wasn't a jerk, after all, but a really cool gamer dad, who knew? And on and on, WoTC seemed lost. So, we waited, along with all the good people at Paizo and when they decided they were going to take the proverbial bull by the horns, we hopped on the bull with them and what a ride it was.
In the end, we had a shiny new Pathfinder and WotC was left in our dust. I have never once regretted our decision to go with the company that was open, honest and truly loved their fans. I was astonished at how respectful of their audience they were and genuinely interested in what we had to say. It was refreshing. It is has been our weekly game of choice here since 2008.
Even more time has passed and now we have two children. We recently funded Monte Cook's Numenera Kickstarter which was just magic to watch happen. We have enjoyed a whole new system of RP that is less crunchy and much easier to help bring our children to the table. Reading, writing and math aren't quite the struggle they once were and they have such creative minds, I love to watch them learn and think things through. It's fun to be a part of their problem solving process. Gaming has opened up a lot of topics of conversation that would never come up organically.
During all of this I was meeting new and interesting people. People who were not like me in many ways, but drawn together because of our hobby. People who were different ethnicity, sexual orientations, religions, and heaven only knew what, but they were all people and for the most part, really good people.
Gaming has given me opportunities that I have not gotten anywhere else. I learned more about myself pretending to be other people than I thought imaginable. I learned more about other people than I could have ever done at home. I traveled, experienced new places and new ways of thinking and seeing things. I found a community of diverse and beautiful people. I want to give back to them and I want to celebrate who they are, so here we are, you, me and everyone else working toward Maximized Empowerment.
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