eurydicebound

A realization has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks now. I've toyed with the idea of putting up a post about it, but I couldn't figure out what to say. It's finally formed enough to write it down, though, so I thought I'd share.

I am a gamer.

I realize this will sound really dumb to anyone who's known me any length of time. I'm afraid it's unavoidable. It's taken me this long to really internalize it, which is a sad, sad statement about myself. :)

See, I started way back in the day as a Gamer Girlfriend. Although I enjoyed gaming, I enjoyed socializing and spending time with my boyfriend more. I started gaming as a way to save my then-nascent relationship with my husband (let us not comment on any themes visible here), not because I was especially drawn to it. I loved stories, though, and I loved having him tell his stories to me, so it seemed a good fit. I got into online gaming, again, as a way to spend time with him during a period where I was ready to move home just to see if he noticed. I have traipsed from one game to another for over 15 years now, almost all of them with him involved. I think over the course of my gaming career, I've only ever been in one game that he wasn't a part of. It was an enjoyable pasttime I shared with him, not an activity I would seek out on my own. I was too shy and uninterested in the Game for Game's Sake to want to play with people I didn't know or wouldn't normally want to hang out with.

I assumed this meant I wasn't actually a gamer.

Even after getting a job in the game industry it didn't trip the mental switch. I'd have been an editor anywhere that would take me. It was never my particular dream to work with RPGs, though I enjoyed it enough once I got there. Hell, I enjoyed it enough that I didn't want to change fields. Qualifications aside, I really wanted to keep working with RPGs. I enjoyed their particular challenges, and I fell in love with the books. Writing for them was similarly challenging, but I never felt that it marked me as a gamer. I had a life apart from Gaming, and enjoyed the things I did that weren't games as much as the games themselves. I couldn't be a gamer, right?

Only now, at the end of my marriage, am I realizing that I want to find a game I can play, with or without him. I want to play World of Warcraft, and enjoy it a great deal. I want to get books because I'm interested in them and actually want to play, not because I'm simply book-geeking (although there is that too). I am ready to have a life apart from him, and I want gaming to be a part of it. I've finally managed to separate "gamer" from "obsessive-compulsive person" in my brain, and that lets me own up to the fact that a person who likes to play games is probably a gamer. Duh.

Anyway, this obvious announcement is brought to you by the numbers 20, 12, 6, and the letter D. :)