When we made it over to California Adventure, I talked her into going on a ride called Soarin’ Over California. Of course, simply judging by the name, she was dubious. Another flying ride! But I made her go on it anyway.

If you’re not familiar with it: Soarin’ Over California simulates a trip over California in a hangglider. You sit in a big bench seat, strapped in, and get lifted into the air in front of a huge, floor-to-ceiling, 180-degree movie screen. Wind blows in your face. When you fly over the redwoods, you smell pine; when you fly over orange groves you get a faint whiff of oranges. It’s incredibly immersive and maybe the one thing that makes those Parkhopper tickets worth it, at least for one day.*

As we were exiting the ride, I asked my mother what she thought about it. She waved me off. Oh great, I thought. She hated it. I don’t get it! It wasn’t the least bit scary or motion-sickness-inducing! When we got outside the ride, I asked her again, and she took off her sunglasses. There were tears in her eyes.

My mom is 66 years old and spent most of her teen years and adulthood in California. She had memories of every single place we flew over, and the immersive nature of the ride brought them all rushing back. “I just love this state so damn much,” she said to me, voice a bit strangled.

One of the biggest traps we can fall into as designers is to conflate mediums and genres. I never thought a theme park ride could make my mother cry! And, of course, the only reason it hadn’t happened was because no one had tried to do it. This revelation isn’t exactly news in the game design world, thanks to the Wii and the Kinect and the iPad and the Gameboy DS, but it seems like it is a lesson we are resistant to learning. Maybe it’s because people who make games now are people who loved games as they were, and everyone wants to design games that they themselves will love and play.

(Incidentally: THIS is the reason it’s so important to do outreach and inclusiveness to attract women, people of color and others with diverse backgrounds and experiences to design games! Our medium wants to be as loved and respected as cinema, but it will not be until it is embraced by EVERY walk of life the way that cinema has been; and that happened through more and more people wanting to share their unique visions through film.)

Whatever the reason, we limit ourselves when we think that a medium belongs only to a certain demographic: roleplaying games are for dorky guys aged 16-30. Social games are for housewives aged 30-40. Console games are for bros aged 18-24. The Wii is for kids. Has there ever been a video game that made my mother cry? No, but then, I don’t think anyone has designed an experience in a video game expressly to make her cry, either.

This is one of the reasons I’m so psyched to work for Loot Drop. I feel strongly that Ghost Recon Commander is breaking down the idea of “social games” as a genre, and helping them mature into their own as a medium. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it; Ghost Recon Commander goes live soon. If you like shooters, why don’t you give it a spin and see what the medium can do?

* I feel obligated to note that there was one other thing that made CA Adventure worth it for us: front row seats for the amazing Aladdin stage show and a private meet-and-greet  afterward. But that’s not really an experience open to everyone.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday near and dear to my heart, here are some photos I took of Brenda Brathwaite’s profound and moving game about the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, Síochán Leat. I wrote a blog post about the game previously, which is handily linked in the title.

Here are the photos. Tom Hall set up all the lighting equipment and backgrounds; I just shamelessly stole his setup.

[N.B. This section previously said: While it may be difficult for me to believe that it was a bunch of angry feminists who discounted the advice of male allies and would rather talk and exchange business cards than get down to work, I was not there and have no evidence to the contrary.

I have, since publishing this article, been approached by a few of the DEI participants who feel as though Sheppard has drastically and tragically misconstrued an experience they found uplifting and unifying.]

 Stereotypes and Barriers

The Gamasutra article begins with an innocuous premise— that stereotypes are harmful, and that pervasive gender-based stereotypes have much to do with the lack of representation of women in the games industry. Sure; I’ll go with that. But then, Sheppard takes it to a weird place:

Stereotyping “underscores the feeling echoed throughout our culture that women are abnormal, unusual and different,” she says. “This feeling that they don’t fit or don’t belong keeps many women from entering game development and similar fields.”

[...]

Stereotypes affect how women perceive other women as well; women frequently complain that they abandon game events because “there are no women” there, and even when Sheppard points out that there were women in attendance, she gets a response like “well, that was somebody’s girlfriend.” Even women can be reductive of and dismissive of one another.

At this point, Sheppard seems to be arguing that A) gender-based stereotypes are bad for women, and B) these gender-based stereotypes are predominantly the fault of women. Though she does not explicitly say the fault is predominantly that of female devs, there is absolutely zero mention or discussion of these hurtful stereotypes and their expressions by, or impact on, men.

Instead, she makes an argument that women-only spaces are the cause for the ill-feelings of male devs, and implies that these initiatives are a type of soft misandry— while assuming that women involved in the incubator were less deserving or would work less hard than men for the same exposure:

And given that the idea of a women-focused games incubator generally draws so much media attention and celebration, Sheppard feared that the participants would be resented by other independent developers, who have had to work extremely hard to receive press attention and the same degree of celebration.

[...]

“These women in games initiatives push us closer to a gender-stratified industry, where we have game developers and ‘female game developers’… these designations separate us, emphasize our differences and marginalize one gender while privileging the other,” Sheppard says.

In the program she was disappointed to see many expressed a “discriminatory attitude towards men and a de-valuing of their potential contributions.”

The attempt to “Transcend” gender diminishes everyone

Personal anecdote time. I’m actually sympathetic to these arguments, because they are very similar to my viewpoint years ago— I was incredibly uncomfortable in spaces where I felt the contributions of women were privileged over men, and felt strongly that what I thought of as “reverse sexism” was just as harmful as misogyny. What changed? It’s not that I suddenly experienced a ton of new sexist behavior directed at me. It’s not that I suddenly felt the need for female-only spaces where I could truly celebrate my lack of a Y chromosome.

I listened to women who’ve had it worse than me, and I did my homework on social justice. And, it turns out, a lot of the attitudes and arguments presented in Sheppard’s talk (as presented in the article) are incredibly common sentiments that have been used to silence or discount minorities for years.

People who have experienced injustice often have a tendency to identify themselves strongly by their anger, by a reaction to their injury, and by absolute rejection of a perceived perpetrator – even if many of those perceptions have to do with their own stereotyping and endemic biases.

“It’s vital to grow beyond simply rejecting men and instead to reject the constructs of gender entirely,” says Sheppard. She believes that in some cases, aims to target discrimination and inequality by favoring marginalized people can actually further it. In such cases, individuals are still allowing stereotypes to form the basis of their understanding of people, possibly to lasting negative consequences.

St. Cloud State University debunks many of these fairly well— blaming the minority’s anger or willingness to talk about inequality for their marginalization and the myth of the equal playing field are particularly present here. But I’m going to talk about the one thing that bothers me the most: the idea that gender is “irrelevant” and should be “transcended.”

I would not call my gender the defining trait of who I am, but I find Sheppard’s unease with women for whom “gender was a very important part of their personalities, lives and identities” kind of baffling. Even if you as a person do not personally strongly identify with your gender, the point is that the rest of the world strongly identifies you with your gender. Your gender is obvious without speaking to you (or, if not, you open yourself up to further discrimination and ridicule). Our entire society is based around a male-female split: in advertising, in where you go to the restroom and what part of a gym you use, in clothing and on your driver’s license and what indignities you suffer once a year at the hands of your gender-specialized doctor. (And for that matter, whether your insurance will cover your sexual health— but that’s a different debate.)

It does not matter whether or not you define yourself as a woman, because the world has done it for you. And as long as the games industry does not exist in a vacuum— as long as people go home to the larger and unfortunately unequal society we live in— we cannot transcend gender in the game industry.

I don’t naturally gravitate to women-only spaces, but I appreciate their existence and what they do for the women who are most comfortable there. Sheppard says for herself (when not lamenting that “learning was secondary to the formation of bonds and relationships” in the women-in-games incubator she ran) that “12 women made their first game in a supportive environment.” By every definition, that is a success. I’m a pretty strong swimmer, but I wouldn’t deride life preservers as privileging people who can’t swim over those who worked hard to learn how to swim against the tide.

More than all of this, though, I don’t want people to forget that I’m a woman. I don’t want to have to transcend gender. The idea that getting rid of something about myself I accept and on occasion even like is the ideal diminishes the totality of who I am. (Not to mention the problems inherent in a culture with a majority, where “transcending X” usually translates to “Be more like the majority.”) I think there’s a lost opportunity when diversity is promoted by downplaying the things that make us diverse. The pressure to “fit in” to the majority’s culture and their line of thinking can prevent women from discovering what makes them unique and valuable— and giving them safe spaces to think differently and discover what they bring to the table can ultimately foster a wider variety of viewpoints than if they jumped into the ocean with both feet.

An Addendum: Corporate Culture

Sheppard’s blog post talks about the ways in which corporate culture can be exclusionary, and it’s perhaps the biggest case of her getting it right and wrong all at once.

If you are hiring, pursue a gender-neutral environment that strikes a balance between action figures, game merchandise & comics, and plants, graphic art & minimalist clean lines. Show people a space that treats them as equal, allows them to bring their own personality, rather than asking them to fit into a less broadly defined and potentially limiting architecture (Cheryan et al., 2009).

The idea that the “nerd” stereotype is the main and most predominant barrier to females entering game development (which she does not say, but again, is the only example she gives) is personally offensive to me as a female nerd and also kind of baffling. Never before have geeky pursuits been so celebrated in the mainstream culture, and never have so many women happily admitted to “geeking out.” Additionally— and especially in the game dev world— those particular examples can be great indicators of a shared cultural literacy that can really benefit game development. (As can football memorabilia if you’re making a Madden game, or magazine covers if you’re making a fashion game.)

For the record: Loot Drop is an incredibly diverse work environment, with as many female game designers as male, and a host of other women in the office, too— as well as a wide variety of ethnicities, or as Brenda would say, “We look like the fuckin’ United Nations.” This is while selecting to rigidly maintain a corporate culture which includes a basic cultural literacy of, and fierce passion for games of all stripes. We’ve had long company-wide discussions of makeup and cute shoes, and we will ardently argue about the merits of Chrono Trigger or Star Trek versus Star Wars.

Sheppard says “Socialization has biased us all in some way, and while it’s easy for us to see each other’s biases, we’re reluctant to see them in ourselves,” and I feel like this is perhaps the most pervasive truth of the entire article.

When I read things like this, though, it breaks my heart:

Can there be more commercially viable game genres than the ones “aimed at teenage boys”, and can commercial game culture ever truly embrace diversity? Will GameLand ever truly want me?

(emphasis mine)

I’m not going to address the despairing over more commercially viable game genres, because that’s already been addressed by social games companies, casual game companies, the makers of Brain Age and Dance Central and a host of other smash hits that may not come immediately to mind when you think “Gamer,” but are smash hits nonetheless. It’s that last sentence that bothers me the most.

I’m going to tell a story. It might get me in trouble, but what the heck, I’m going to tell it anyway.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a (tabletop) game designer. The idea of writing my own game never occurred to me; the pinnacle of my ambition was to write for my favorite game franchise. I was incredibly active in the online community for that game (where the company liked to pick up freelancers), I wrote a ton of homebrew content and I networked with the more high-profile writers for the line— ones who were known for taking noob freelancers under their wing, recommending them to the company, and getting them their first bylines. I watched guys I’d known for years pass me by and get what I’d been working twice as hard for. I’d post new material on the forums and fans would go nuts for it while the people who worked on the game would comment on how cute my icon was. But I put up with it, I thanked them, I smiled, and I kept trying to get them to look at my stuff. I made it known what my goal was. I figured “This is what it takes. This is how all my (male) friends got into the business, and I can do it this way too.”

Finally, one day, the writer most known for helping people get into freelancing IMed me and said he had an important question. I thought for sure this was my chance, after three years of work. And he asked me: “I was talking with [other developer] and we got into an argument: are you my fangirl, or are you his?”

And that’s when I left the game and the community.

But, like I said on Twitter, I never once asked myself if GameLand would ever want me. That question was irrelevant. I wanted GameLand, full stop, and nothing else mattered.

(By the way? Three years later the same company flew me in to interview for a position as a full-time designer on a way meatier project. There were a huge amount of sexist hints that made it clear to me I wouldn’t want to work there, and we mutually decided it was a poor fit. But walking through those doors was a great vindication.)

So what happened in those three years? And how did I end up working where I work— with two other freaking amazing female designers and a host of people from all backgrounds and perspectives? The most important thing I could ever tell anyone wanting to “break into” the industry, anyone who wants to know if it’s worth it or if they will find kindred spirits who get what they’re doing and why.

I made games.

I didn’t ask for anyone’s permission. I made tabletop games, because that’s what I could make with no coding experience. I made games I wanted to play— games that were fun and challenging and niche and occasionally autobiographical. I blogged about my trials and errors, I gave back to the community as much as I got, and… yeah. I made games.

That’s the big lie. There’s no “breaking in” to game development. Waiting for your break is like standing outside of a public library waiting for someone to invite you in. If you have the love and the drive, you can walk through that door on your own.

As to whether it’s worth it, well, that’s up to you and how badly you want it. I will say some of my best and most popular/successful work was inspired when someone pissed me right the fuck off. I think I’d be a crappier designer if I were male— not so much because of my different life experiences, but because I would have been exposed to fewer stupid assumptions about who I was and what I could do, which means I would have been less angry and less inspired as a result.

Up until this point, the “you” has been a generic you, but I’m going to go ahead and address Mohini: there are a hell of a lot of amazing female game devs out there, maybe more than you think. People are looking “beyond hardcore gamer demographic” now more than ever. And you know what? Every female game dev I’ve met has been amazingly generous in time and spirit.

I bet if you took that step, you’d be surprised by the welcome you’d get.

I’ve heard from seasoned veteran designers that a lot of new designers who are working on their first game want to remake their favorite Final Fantasy game. It’s not surprising; we all have the games that made us sit up and take notice of the medium, the things that made us fall in love. Taking apart and putting back together a game you love can be another way of appreciating it— not just in knowing that you love the game because it’s fun, but deliberately breaking it down and learning about the design decisions that MAKE it fun, the elegance of the code base that makes it run so quickly, and all the other tiny things that equal “fun.” It’s a rich tradition, like taking apart and putting back together a toaster to see how it works.

Thing is, you don’t then commercially release the toaster as your own design.

I think that’s the thing that bothers me the most about the most egregious copies in games: I don’t get the impression that the designers learned anything fundamental about WHY the games they copied were worth copying, other than their popularity. It’s like copying off of a friend in a French exam: you might get a passing score, but you’re not going to be able to find the restroom if you ever go to Paris. If you’re going to rip something apart and put it back together— if you’re a real designer, you’re going to want to think about those decisions and evaluate them, figure out what makes the game go ’round. The exact decisions NimbleBit pointed out in their response to Zynga about Tiny Tower— “Why are there 5 different business types like Tiny Tower? Why do 5 people fit in an apartment instead of 4 or 6?” Those are major decisions with huge gameplay ramifications. A game designer wanting to learn from those decisions would pore over them.

And a game designer who loved what they do would be itching to put their mark on it— to make their own decisions and see what happens.

I think that’s the essence of creativity, and the difference between emulation and inspiration. People who have the urge to create don’t have the urge to remake something wholecloth and call it theirs. My favorite musical artist, Mike Doughty, said a smart thing in an interview recently when the interviewer asked him why there aren’t more stories about “the creative process” in his new autobiography:

Most of them would be like, “So I heard this Mary J. Blige song, and there was something I wanted to rip off from it. But I didn’t want to be too obvious about it, so I changed it a little bit. And then I thought about it and messed with it some more and then thought about it some more, and then I sang it to the bass player.” It’s that story over and over and over again.

And I think that’s it. When I sat down to write Blowback I wasn’t trying to rewrite five seasons of Burn Notice word for word— I took the hook of something I loved, and messed around with it until I got the same feeling through procedural rhetoric as I got through watching my favorite episodes. Creatives are inspired by everything, and anyone who says they aren’t is lying to you. But the thing that separates the artists from the tradesmen is the urge to make something yours.

So it’s hard for me to respect people as creators when they non-critically rip off a whole design belonging to someone else— not just because of the moral repugnancy of that action, but because it says volumes about who they are, or aren’t, as a designer. I’m not saying I’m an AMAAAAZING game designer; I am saying I would rather design a shitty game of my own than painstakingly copy the most brilliant game in the world and pass it off as my own.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my life. I’m thirty. I’ve made a lot of things happen for myself— and that is a really cool thing to be able to say when you’re in your twenties, ‘I made a lot of things happen for myself.”

Shit, I thought. I haven’t made ANYthing happen for myself.

It’s not that I haven’t done anything. The more I thought about it, the more there is to be proud of from my twenties: Six books in publication with my name on them, two great kids, loving family, dream job doing what I love, some awards, people who love me and who I love back, I raised over $20,000 for people who needed it in the last year alone.  I own (outright!) an old car that is only slightly run down and which is very practical. I am doing okay, in the grand scheme of things.

None of this, not any of it, is something that I would say I “made happen.”

My mother, for as long as I can remember, has chided me to “live with an attitude of gratitude.” And perhaps I overdo it a bit— I am always very conscious of who I am thankful to and for what, to the point where friends have made fun of me for expressing my gratitude to them all the time. Call me untalented, self-absorbed, ugly, lazy, whatever— just never boring or ungrateful. I am fortunate to have been able to accomplish as many things as I’ve accomplished in the last thirty years, and not a single bit of it is something I could have made happen for myself. I have been crazy lucky to meet the right people at the right time to help set me on the path I have been following, and I keep that list of names in my head, and every day I think about how fortunate I am to have crossed paths with these people. (And yes, one of the “names” on the list is “every person who has ever bought one of my games.”)

Seriously. Sometimes people ask me how to “break into” games or how I managed to find an awesome job in this economy or something similar, and my answer is so freaking pedestrian. Be polite, find people willing to help you and then don’t take that for granted. Be polite some more. If that doesn’t get you all the way there, rinse and repeat. I mean, there’s social networking and digital whatever and who knows how the kids are demonstrating their with-it-iness these days, but civility and gratitude are like a string of pearls— they never go out of style.

So, yeah. The more I think about it, the more okay I am with not being able to brag about how I made a lot of things happen for myself over the last thirty years. I’d rather give credit where credit is due— and besides, I think it’s way cooler to think about the ways I have helped make a lot of things happen for others.

Game-related postscript:

I was anguishing on this very subject at Brenda Garno in the kitchen at work last month. I said something about how I’d fully expected to take over the world when I was in my twenties. Brenda gave me a withering look. “Why would you ever want to take over the world? That’s just taking over someone else’s IP. We make worlds. That’s better.” It is, perhaps, the choicest piece of perspective I have ever been given, and if I ever have a computer room again, I am getting that printed out and framed on the wall.

I want to give you my sculpture of Jensen Ackles.

This bad boy is lovingly hand-made from organic California raisins and hot glue. Note the attention to detail in his lovingly-rendered bedhead. Jensen now has a bit of trouble standing up on his own; I’m assuming the drying out of the raisins is leading to a changing shape. But my husband has insisted we display this amazing bust prominently in our study, and I would like it to go to a loving home.

(Side note: I was genuinely surprised how many guys told me that it was “sexy” that I was so in to this scavenger hunt. Really? This is attractive? Because there is a whole subculture of women willing to make raisin-portraits of TV stars who would love to go out with you.)

STEPS TO WIN JENSEN ACKLES:

- Comment on this post (using an email you check)

- Be from the US (I don’t want to look up raisin import laws to Argentina or anything)

- Wait for MY BIRTHDAY (January 7th), when I will announce the winner and email for your mailing address!

This is an ORIGINAL WORK OF ART, people. A chance like this doesn’t come around every day.

Cookie Monday is not a game, and it is a partial misnomer. It began on one Monday not long after I started working at Loot Drop; I’d made a giant batch of brown-butter chocolate chip cookies (as you might be able to tell, I love to cook, and I have recently learned to love to bake). Chris, our Technical Director, also brought in these AMAZING snickerdoodles made by his partner. It was total coincidence, but the change in the mood in the office was palpable. The work day at our offices skews toward starting late and ending late, so there are few people there early in the morning— usually me, a couple programmers, and an artist or two. There are even fewer people in early on Mondays, and the office is sleepy and quiet. With the appearance of cookies, however, everyone was upbeat! Someone said “Hooray for Cookie Monday!”

This was interesting to me, so I decided to continue making baked goods to bring in on Mondays. After a parade of oatmeal-cherry cookies with cracked black pepper, chocolate chip brownies, chili-spiked gingersnaps, 7-layer bars and more brownies (everyone loves brownies), it seems like people are happier, and occasionally some even come in earlier to ensure they don’t miss out on the baked goods. Plus it’s a good excuse for me to find new recipes, and as boring as it sounds, few things beat a quiet Sunday night with my stand mixer.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to see if the dough for my cinnamon-sugar pull apart bread has doubled in size yet.

The Alpha Fan

I don’t know why I have such a weird aversion to calling people who like my games my fans, but I do. I used to vehemently resist it at all— I think because I see people who like what I do and instead of thinking “Oh, a fan!” I think “Oh, someone who likes something I like!” and I enjoy engaging with them on a peer level that I think is usually the opposite of what’s implied in the typical creator/fan relationship. Which is funny, because I am happy to consider myself a fan of people I enjoy peer relationships with— I am a huge fan of Vincent Baker, for example; I am one of those annoying people who thinks everything he touches turn to gold. But I also used to live down the street from him, we used to occasionally watch each other’s kids and sit around drinking beer and making RPG theory diagrams. This is all a digression to say: I am weird about having fans okay.

When I finally pulled the trigger and launched TBF’s Kickstarter campaign, someone mock-angrily tweeted that he couldn’t believe they were the SECOND person to pledge to support my game— he’d wanted to be the first! (If you’ve never experienced the self-critical anguish of starting a Kickstarter, let me say: nothing helps relieve the initial fears of rejection like that kind of reaction.) Over the next month, every time I made a new announcement, this self-proclaimed alpha fan retweeted it, and tweeted me encouragement.

About halfway through the Kickstarter campaign, I heard about my friend Kelly’s giant medical bills from her fight against cancer, and wanted to do something. I had dinner with my friend Ryan and explained that, while I really wanted to do another PDF fundraiser for Kelly like the Sight For Sore Eyes fundraiser I’d run earlier in the year for a friend who learned she was going blind, I was concerned. I didn’t want the message to get muddled, and with me promoting my TBF Kickstarter at the same time, I was concerned some Internet trolls would crap on the fundraiser because I seemed greedy. Which is when Ryan smiled and said, “You won’t seem greedy if I’m the face for it!” and thus, a partnership was born.

Since Ryan did a lot of the promotion and I did the behind-the-scenes organization, it solved the problems I was concerned about. Except for one thing: I got a very sad note from the afore-mentioned alpha fan. “I’m sorry, I had to cancel my backing for THEY BECAME FLESH so that I could afford to donate for your charity bundle.”

Without even thinking about it, I DMed him and asked for his mailing address so that I could send him a copy of the game when it was over, anyway. If you asked me why at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it, other than “It’s the right thing to do.” In hindsight, it’s a combination of a lot of things: wanting to do something for someone who clearly doesn’t have a lot of disposable income, but was willing to use it to either support me or help a woman with cancer; gratitude for all of the support and publicity he gave me; the glow from two really successful fundraising attempts.

He sent me a really sweet email that essentially said “This is how you make a lifelong fan.”

Disappointing Other Fans

One thing I pride myself on is the fact that I really listen to people who feel invested in what I do. If I were making a game just for me, I wouldn’t be selling it— I’m making a product that I want people to enjoy, and especially after a decade of running my own business, I take customer satisfaction really seriously.

When I was organizing my Kickstarter, I decided to make a “wow” reward— leather-bound copies of the game with hand-illuminated covers. They were pricey, but I figured what the hell, it’d be fun to have them out there. After thinking about demand and talking to my illuminator about the load they could handle, we settled on a limited edition of 25 leatherbound copies. Ryan said to me, “People will love those. I bet you sell 4 or 5 of ‘em.”

The leatherbound edition sold out halfway through the Kickstarter.

I can’t emphasis enough what a surprise that was. The most supportive and optimistic of my friends said we’d sell ten. 25 was a crazy moon number, something we came up with to ensure it had a limited cache, but that everyone interested could get one. I was not expecting to be in a position to receive irate emails about how a customer had found out too late about the Kickstarter and missed out on the leatherbound copies entirely.

One supporter in particular was extremely polite, but made it clear on repeated occasions that he was dying for a leatherbound copy of the book and nothing else would satisfy him. Polite, but very insistent. I hated the idea of not being able to give this guy what he wanted, but even more, I didn’t want to cheat the 25 people who went above and beyond my expectations out of the special, elite qualities of the thing they had purchased from me.

Eventually, with deep and genuine sadness, I made it clear to him that no more leatherbound editions would be made of the game.

I’m not sure what this means.

It’s just a glimpse into how I approach caring for the people who care enough to support what I do. Will the people who bought the standard copy of TBF feel like I cheapened their support by giving away a copy? I don’t know. Am I an idiot for kissing goodbye hundreds of bucks I could get by lifting the “limited edition” from the leatherbound copies? Maybe. But one of the great things about self-publishing is that these are my decisions to make, and I can make my business reflect what feels right to me. Even if it’s wrong.

I haven’t been in constant contact with her over the last seven years, but every time we’ve bumped back into each other— on iStock, on Facebook, or on her awesome husband’s awesome Minecraft server— she has brightened my life with kindness and laughter.

This was going to be a post about how Kelly was recently diagnosed with cancer; it’s taken a significant toll on her well-being and her wallet, but her optimism and kick-ass attitude remain unscathed. I’ve been working behind the scenes with my friend Ryan for the last couple weeks to get everything set up for an RPG bundle we put together to benefit Kelly. We launched it this morning— a month to hit a goal of $4,000, which is a little over half of Kelly’s medical bills.

It’s been up for eight hours or so. By the time I am done with this post, we will have hit $8,000. In a single day.

You can still donate money to get the bundle; it’s staying up through January 1st and everything above Kelly’s medical expenses will go to the American Cancer Society, to help find a cure and help people who don’t have a nerd army at the ready like we do. But I am already in awe.

My religious background is weird and complex (as you might have surmised from THEY BECAME FLESH), but these days there’s one thing I say when people ask me what I believe. It is a John Mayer lyric, unfortunately, but it’s a good one: “I believe my life’s gonna see the love I give return to me.”

I don’t know about anyone else. I’m not religious or drunk enough to tackle the question of why bad things happen to good people. But I do know this: when you put random love and kindness out into the universe, I think it comes back to you. It’s been true in my life and I see it being true in Kelly’s, and to all of you who are donating, I hope it will be true for you as well.

We’re all in this together. Might as well do what we can to make it as pleasant as we can, for as many people as we can, for as long as we can.

<3

Thank you.