My parents lied to me, as I am sure yours have to you. My folks encouraged this love for books that I developed at a young age, I was devouring Ronald Dahl books like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” when the rest of my class was struggling through “Go Dog, Go.” They were so pleased in my burgeoning imagination that they eagerly took me to the bookstore at the slightest provocation, enthralled to see me spend the day in a poufy red armchair going through a series of “Goosebumps” and “Animorphs.” If they were worried about my lack of friends through middle school, they didn’t show it too much.

A strange thing occurred at my family’s move to Northern California, I was given the task of reading for assignment rather than pleasure. For the first time in my young life, the books took effort to go through, the pressure of the deadline constantly disrupting any flow I could get within the text. It didn’t help that the majority of the homework-novels were overrated trash like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” That, combined with an entrance into a social life with a chick destined to wind up pregnant at 14, made my taste for books weaken. This wouldn’t have been a problem if my mind could focus on daily life without the escapism that books had provided. Normalcy was so damn boring, even with my two-years-too-early sexual and social experimentation. Lack of dragons and vampires will do that.  

But a similar revelation occurred at my entry to high school, I began to make friends through my knowledge and love for Dungeons and Dragons. I had always been a Genesis kid, with occasionally borrowed PC titles like my stepfather’s “Might and Magic” series and “The Curse of Monkey Island,” but this was the first time gaming found its way into my adolescent psyche alongside books as solace. This was gaming before the plunge into mainstay frag-fests, and thankfully before the term “casual gamer” existed. The Playstation 2 was finally heating up and I began devouring titles like “Final Fantasy X” and “Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance.” I found my way back to the PC for the “Diablo” series, and took the next few Nintendo handheld incarnations with me wherever I went. My universe exploded with the idea of a medium that didn’t remind me of school, and I have been a gamer ever since. My love for the medium has grown alongside my personal and emotional development leading me back to the text-based “Zork” series and to demos of the newest and greatest. I have watched in a sort of childish happiness, as what was essential a hobby and a good time with friends be acknowledged on the grand stage, exploding into an influx of creative talent behind my soon-to-be-favorite games.

After dabbling in erotic forums, I applied the skills that got me the highest grades in English and began writing about what playing games inspired in me, allowing my once condemning imagination to expand the universes beyond that which videogame technology could handle. Through the next few years I would revert back to my love of reading, but this time it would be attempting to keep up with my thoughts and typing. I was hesitant to get into the blogging, seeing the torrents of gossip-laden shallow-fests on the internet, but thanks to summer boredom I swallowed my pride and began posting my thoughts online for the world to see, getting some decent viewership out of it, to my surprise. It was in this passion for textual expression that I was noticed and put on a publicized pedestal for my work, bringing me in a demented circle in my relationship with the written. My interest in gaming culture has only grown since then, with life-experience adding new layers to gameplay, and new excuses to pick up a controller. Find a moral in this and I’ll kill you.