The Geek that Would Be a Prince

They say that a first impression is a lasting one. I wonder what kind of impression I've made on you. I've been talking to you but haven't even told you my name. Well to be fair to myself, I did say that introductions would come later, but I wonder if even saying that was bad form...I'm rambling; if you were absolutely turned away then you won't be reading this and therefore it won't matter, ha.

With no further ado, my name is Antoine Jay Anderson. Now I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how much of myself I wanted to reveal to you. Funny enough, what name to give was about 90% of that process. I don't like my name. Antoine just doesn't sound right to me, and Jay is about one of the most boring names I've ever seen. Throughout my lifetime, I have tried different methods to make my name more interesting. I have switched back and forth between Antoine and Jay; I have pronounced Antoine differently to make it sound more like a name I don't mind, An - tō - nee. And the most recent attempt, about 7 years ago, was to show homage to Japanese culture (which I love!) and change the spelling of the name I now go by, Jay, to be phonetically correct in Japanese, Jei.

I was actually satisfied with my name for the first time in my life. It was an interesting spin on the name that my mother had given me and everyone that I've met in the past 7 years has thought that I have a cool name, one that they've never seen before. All was well until my family starting joining Facebook. Some of them, my mother being the first, started addressing me as Jay and that brought inquiries from friends, but what really affected me was the ones that addressed me as Jei... It suddenly occurred to me that Jei, as much as I loved it, was a moniker, a pen name, and it hurt my heart to see these people, the most important people in my life, who had been spelling my name as Jay since I was born, change just to suit me. So now, after 29 years of trying to be different, I settle back on the name and spelling that my mom decided on on June 10, 1981; Jay.

That being said, a lot of friends still spell my name Jei and I still love that spelling, so it's perfectly fine to and that's where the aforementioned internal struggle came from. So being a man of compromise, I decided it would be best to tell you my whole name and if you look at my signature line, you'll see that the spelling I chose is simply, J.

Wow...what's in a name right? So if you do the math, you'll see that I am on the last fringes of my 28th year on this earth. I'm a husband and a father. And my favorite thing to do is play massively multi-player online games.

In 2003, I was reading my favorite magazine, Newtype America (R.I.P.), one day and I came across this ad that was a free trial for a game where the characters in it looked like anime characters called Ragnarok Online. I read the description and saw that it was an RPG, which was by far my favorite genre of video game. It also said that you could play with thousands of people at one time and that part, I was confused about because the most people I'd even talked to at this time was probably about 50 in an AIM chatroom. But whatever, getting a chance to be an anime character, I was in.

So I installed the game, made my first character, Animeus, and walked into a world that was fated to be my home away from home for the very first time. Going through the tutorial was easy enough and at the end of it, there was short personality test to tell you what class would probably be best for you. Ragnarok chose swordsman for me however being the non-conformist that I am =), I chose mage (which I ended up hating). Once graduating from the tutorial, I got sent to the main city, Prontera, and was instantly overwhelmed. I was surrounded by a ton of people, all going about their business and absolutely ignoring me, I didn't know where to go or what to do. Somehow, I found my way out of the busy city square, and decided to try out my brand new skills and kill something. I saw some people fighting these butterfly looking things so I decided to too. I swung at it, it dodged, and then it killed me. I'm persistent (and prideful) so I got back up, determined to end that butterfly and it spanked me like a child a second time. This went on for about 5 rounds before I was ready to exit out of the game and uninstall, when a beautiful dancer walked up...no, she really was a dancer. It's a class in the game, look it up. A beautiful dancer walked up beside me, whip in hand, and *crack, crack, CRACK* the butterfly from hell was on the ground. Victory! Even though it wasn't necessarily mine, it still was; kinda. So anyhow she laughed at me and told me that at level 4 I was supposed to be over -----> killing those, not these until I was around 10. Oh. Well why didn't any of the other people standing around watching me get my ass handed to me say anything? She offered to "tank" for me for a while so that I could level up faster, which consisted of her smacking a butterfly one time with her whip and then letting it attempt to hit her, while her hips swaying, dodged the lashes. Meanwhile, I was supposed to make my feeble, furious, assault on the butterfly safe from harm. Two hours later and I was hooked...on a dancer, and a genre. The dancer and I aren't kicking it anymore but 8 years later, the genre and I, we're still going strong.

Ragnarok was my first, but since then I have traveled the lands of almost every major (pay to play) MMO out there. Everything from World of Warcraft to EvE and Champions Online, if it came out in the past decade, I've probably at least played the 14 day free trial.

Now I'm not your stereotypical gamer (I've heard). I'm what you would call an anomaly, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a cool guy playing at geek. That's what they say; but honestly, I'm just Steve Urkel without the suspenders. Oh! Or the high water pants. Now granted, that was then. I remember when I first started getting onto gamer forums and talking on vent back in Vanilla WoW and people were seeing my pictures saying, "That's not really you, come on!" then hearing my voice and retracting saying, "Oh damn...well maybe it is." But that was because at the time, online gaming was almost taboo. It was limited to the rejects who could not function in a proper social environment...the hottest night club in town. The overweight, the math nerd, the stay at home mom with nothing to do...not a guy that worked out and sounded like Barry White. So although I wasn't truly an anomaly even then, I can understand why some may have thought that. Nowadays however, WoW may as well be Match.com with all the hot guys and girls it has to offer. Gaming, I believe single-handedly because of the World of Warcraft, is damn near the cool thing to do. If you don't believe me, check out GorgeousGamers.com.

The world of MMOs has changed much around me since that first day in Prontera, and not all of the changes have been for the better. But the core still remains, a place where people who may not ever have met if left to the physical world, are able to meet, form and nurture relationships, and have fun killing wolves, boars, dragons, and some times even a rock out in space or two, all at the same time for $15/mo. What could be better? I'm a gamer, geeky and proud.

Play Me!