Electric Challenge 1-3
@electric_challenge is a dreamwidth community encouraging people to make dreamwidth posts about gaming.
Stage 1: A friending meme
Stage 2: My history as a player of computer games, below.
Stage 3: My favourite gaming communities:
@otome_games, which I started when the mod of the previous otome community vanished. It's a small but very nice group and they're fun to squee with.
I poked through my subscriptions but all the other dreamwidth gaming communities I'm in haven't had any posts in months :(
The Black Emporium discord, for the Dragon Age rarepair exchange, is pretty active. I muted it when I needed a break from exchanges but everyone was very nice last time I popped in.
I'm on a few game dev discords but try to keep my game dev persona a bit separate to my fannish one. I can pass on links to anyone who's interested!
And now my history as a player of computer games, under the cut.
I love games, but am also very bad at almost all of them, with very bad reaction times and coordination. So since the beginning, I've made my own games, because the ones I wanted to (or even could) play didn't exist.
My first real contact with computer games that I can remember was in around 1988, when I was 8.
My primary school class had a copy of the educational adventure puzzle game Grannie's Garden, which we all tried to get past collaboratively. We had another game which I think may have been Oregon Trail, I just remember we found it boring and confusing, it wasn't really designed to appeal to Australian children lol.
My parents got me an old second-hand Amstrad with a few games, mostly of the dodge and/or shoot variety. I wasn't very good at them but had a lot more fun once I realised I could edit the code, and taught myself BASIC programming and pixel editing from the manual, turning bombs into love hearts and creating my own simple programs to edit the system font or mimic the operating system and prank my parents.
There were also a few Zork-esque adventure games, I liked the idea but was very bad at them and never got far.
I was in an academic extension program which had a few programming courses, one involved making our own interactive fiction which was super fun.
Other kids had consoles and I played them sometimes but was always very bad at them. We got a Sega Master System II when I was around 12, and I was very bad at all the platformers etc (while my 5ish yr old younger siblings were great at them, much to my annoyance) but enjoyed playing the easy first levels, and really enjoyed the puzzles in Lemmings.
Highschool at a girls school in the 90s was kind of a wasteland, my family couldn't afford fancy game machines and all the games I saw for sale didn't look like I'd enjoy them anyway. I got to play snippets of other people's games like DOOM etc, as well as games at arcades, but was again very bad at them, and the few times I got temporary access to narrative games like Myst or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I never got to play long enough to see much story. Near the end of highschool a teacher happened to introduce us to Hypercard, and I got VERY EXCITED and spent many lunch breaks on the library computer making my own darkly humourous puzzle game with weird body horror I animated via hand drawn frames. And then the librarians wiped the computer ;_;
At the end of highschool, heading into 1997, I started dating a computer nerd. He was an asshole, but he encouraged me to buy interesting looking games at the game sales he dragged me to. Through this I played a bunch of slightly old adventure games like LOOM and Gabriel Knight, which I adored. I also sometimes stumbled across word puzzle and other untimed games I liked.
I then started dating Cam, a non-asshole computer nerd who let me play the Myst games on his nicer computer. I still saw myself as someone who mostly didn't like computer games.
In around 2000 @sami showed me a Final Fantasy 9 cutscene and I went "Wait, games can be pretty AND have plot???" so went out and bought it and played it absolutely to death.
Cam and I moved in together, and had the money to buy consoles and games, though I saw that as mostly his thing rather than mine. I played Final Fantasy 10, 12, 8, 7, and 6, and also games like Guitar Hero. But I had trouble finding other games I liked and could actually play.
And then in 2009 (when I was 29) Cam asked me to buy him a copy of the Western RPG Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas. I wasn't expecting to play it at all, but then heard...you could date girls in it...as a girl???
And even though I still saw myself as a straight woman this was...oddly...appealing...
So I started playing it and fell immediately in love with the characters and world... and was impossibly bad at the combat. But I loved it so much I figured out how to cheat past the combat and I never looked back. I got SUPER into the fandom in a way I hadn't with pretty much any other canon ever, wrote fic and made art and played through multiple times, and played all the sequels and DLC and am currently part way through my like...sixth or seventh Origins playthrough (this time with a mod to make Morrigan bi since she broke my heart that first playthrough) I've played all the Mass Effect games too.
In 2012 I played my first decent Dating Sim, Magical Diary (which also lets you date girls as a girl) and adored it, and got into visual novels in general. Around that time I encountered Ren'py and started making visual novels for myself, too.
This was around the point where games started becoming more mainstream, meaning more variety and access. I got into exploration games, farming sims, etc. Now I play all sorts of games all the time. But it's been a journey to get here.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/774833.html. There are
comments.
Stage 1: A friending meme
Stage 2: My history as a player of computer games, below.
Stage 3: My favourite gaming communities:
@otome_games, which I started when the mod of the previous otome community vanished. It's a small but very nice group and they're fun to squee with.
I poked through my subscriptions but all the other dreamwidth gaming communities I'm in haven't had any posts in months :(
The Black Emporium discord, for the Dragon Age rarepair exchange, is pretty active. I muted it when I needed a break from exchanges but everyone was very nice last time I popped in.
I'm on a few game dev discords but try to keep my game dev persona a bit separate to my fannish one. I can pass on links to anyone who's interested!
And now my history as a player of computer games, under the cut.
I love games, but am also very bad at almost all of them, with very bad reaction times and coordination. So since the beginning, I've made my own games, because the ones I wanted to (or even could) play didn't exist.
My first real contact with computer games that I can remember was in around 1988, when I was 8.
My primary school class had a copy of the educational adventure puzzle game Grannie's Garden, which we all tried to get past collaboratively. We had another game which I think may have been Oregon Trail, I just remember we found it boring and confusing, it wasn't really designed to appeal to Australian children lol.
My parents got me an old second-hand Amstrad with a few games, mostly of the dodge and/or shoot variety. I wasn't very good at them but had a lot more fun once I realised I could edit the code, and taught myself BASIC programming and pixel editing from the manual, turning bombs into love hearts and creating my own simple programs to edit the system font or mimic the operating system and prank my parents.
There were also a few Zork-esque adventure games, I liked the idea but was very bad at them and never got far.
I was in an academic extension program which had a few programming courses, one involved making our own interactive fiction which was super fun.
Other kids had consoles and I played them sometimes but was always very bad at them. We got a Sega Master System II when I was around 12, and I was very bad at all the platformers etc (while my 5ish yr old younger siblings were great at them, much to my annoyance) but enjoyed playing the easy first levels, and really enjoyed the puzzles in Lemmings.
Highschool at a girls school in the 90s was kind of a wasteland, my family couldn't afford fancy game machines and all the games I saw for sale didn't look like I'd enjoy them anyway. I got to play snippets of other people's games like DOOM etc, as well as games at arcades, but was again very bad at them, and the few times I got temporary access to narrative games like Myst or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I never got to play long enough to see much story. Near the end of highschool a teacher happened to introduce us to Hypercard, and I got VERY EXCITED and spent many lunch breaks on the library computer making my own darkly humourous puzzle game with weird body horror I animated via hand drawn frames. And then the librarians wiped the computer ;_;
At the end of highschool, heading into 1997, I started dating a computer nerd. He was an asshole, but he encouraged me to buy interesting looking games at the game sales he dragged me to. Through this I played a bunch of slightly old adventure games like LOOM and Gabriel Knight, which I adored. I also sometimes stumbled across word puzzle and other untimed games I liked.
I then started dating Cam, a non-asshole computer nerd who let me play the Myst games on his nicer computer. I still saw myself as someone who mostly didn't like computer games.
In around 2000 @sami showed me a Final Fantasy 9 cutscene and I went "Wait, games can be pretty AND have plot???" so went out and bought it and played it absolutely to death.
Cam and I moved in together, and had the money to buy consoles and games, though I saw that as mostly his thing rather than mine. I played Final Fantasy 10, 12, 8, 7, and 6, and also games like Guitar Hero. But I had trouble finding other games I liked and could actually play.
And then in 2009 (when I was 29) Cam asked me to buy him a copy of the Western RPG Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas. I wasn't expecting to play it at all, but then heard...you could date girls in it...as a girl???
And even though I still saw myself as a straight woman this was...oddly...appealing...
So I started playing it and fell immediately in love with the characters and world... and was impossibly bad at the combat. But I loved it so much I figured out how to cheat past the combat and I never looked back. I got SUPER into the fandom in a way I hadn't with pretty much any other canon ever, wrote fic and made art and played through multiple times, and played all the sequels and DLC and am currently part way through my like...sixth or seventh Origins playthrough (this time with a mod to make Morrigan bi since she broke my heart that first playthrough) I've played all the Mass Effect games too.
In 2012 I played my first decent Dating Sim, Magical Diary (which also lets you date girls as a girl) and adored it, and got into visual novels in general. Around that time I encountered Ren'py and started making visual novels for myself, too.
This was around the point where games started becoming more mainstream, meaning more variety and access. I got into exploration games, farming sims, etc. Now I play all sorts of games all the time. But it's been a journey to get here.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/774833.html. There are
comments.