Editor’s note: A hearty welcome to asiangrrlMN, a dear friend who can usually be found at Angry Black Lady Chronicles. She’s also a prolific fiction writer, and you can find some of her excellent zombie-oriented work at Dead Shuffle.
One of asiangrrlMN’s dark elves celebrates a Blood Bowl touchdown.
Hi, I’m asiangrrlMN, culturegamer’s partner in crime for his Let’s Play Magicka! series. I am not a gamer, nor do I play one on TV. I didn’t game much in my youth, save for the occasional game of Pitfall or Ms. Pac-Man, and who among us of a certain age can say differently?
In the past five years or so, I played casual games, but I shied away from hardcore games. Let me be brutally honest – I saw the racism, sexism, and homophobia that runs through the online gaming community, and I wanted no part of it. I’m not a joiner by nature, and I definitely didn’t want to be part of a community that was hostile to me. Plus, I had an outmoded idea of what hardcore games were – mostly first-person shooters in the vein of Call of Duty—and I had little-to-no interest in that kind of thing. It is with this blithe ignorance that I dismissed hardcore video games – until I met Ian, a.k.a. “culturegamer.”
Ian is passionate about games, and through our many discussions about them, he’s helped me see that they are more than ‘just games’ – they have cultural value and can be more engrossing than movies or television. I was intrigued and requested that he find me a game. After much consideration, he suggested Torchlight to me, and I was hooked. I played the hell out of that game, and I loved being involved in a miniature world of dungeon-crawling, monster-smiting, and fishing! I had a pet cat, Enigma, and if I fed her fish, she’d transmogrify into other creatures with varying powers . I played as the Vanquisher in a large part because she’s female and looks vaguely Asian, and I quickly learned to love Mulan and her trusty Toxic Ribauldequin. I also realized that I vastly preferred ranged characters to melee characters, and I’ve stuck with the former mostly in my subsequent forays into RPGs.
culturegamer 