Is this another game blog?
Nope.
I’ll be honest; I’m not a “typical gamer.”
Having existed between Western and Asian mindsets all my life, playing games was my escape from difficult situations.
I grew up poor in one of the richest countries in Asia. When I was 9, I convinced my father to put half of his monthly income on a Nintendo Gameboy Colour so I could play Pokemon Blue— my first ever video game that wasn’t Tetris on his PalmPilot.
My only other interaction was when I was dropped off at my aunt’s to be babysit. My older cousins were addicted to Counter-Strike. I, a precocious young girl among a family of boys, watched them hurl insults at each other through foam headphones while tapping their mice at furious speeds to shoot down other players.
It wasn’t until I enrolled into university that arcades, LAN cafes and MMOs opened up to me. In much of Asia, it was cheaper to join your friends in collaborative gaming at such places instead of staying at home where the dial-up internet was both sketchy and costly. And so, me and a group of 4-5 others would spend hours after class to tag team in Payday, carry out levelling raids in MapleStory, or scream at each other to construct additional pylons in Starcraft. In all of them, I was either a medic or ranger, and ridiculously terrible at both.
After being able to pay for it from working part-time during university, the first console I bought was the Xbox 360 when I was 18. At that moment, a whole world of machismo and excitement materialized at my fingertips.
I remember the rush of driving at (virtually) breakneck speeds in GTA and Saint’s Row, randomly jumping out of my car on the highway, running up to another car, throwing the shocked driver out, stealing their car, and driving backwards to ram into the police after me. I remember how badass I felt finishing Max Payne with my then-partner on hard mode. The confidence air-strumming AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” on Guitar Hero gave me. The hilarity of crashing Portal when I bounced Chell through portals to perfectly get at a ledge an obsessive amount of times.
On hour-long commutes to school and 12-hour flights home, achieving 100% on Persona and Pokemon felt like I “isekai”-ed as a hero to pass the time. My younger precocious self would smile seeing me no longer lose to the group of rowdy boys at a Pokemon tournament.
Many years on, I’ve had the privilege of playing on the Xbox, Playstation, Vita, Gameboys, Switch and on mobile. While my preference for RPGs and puzzle games remains, my love of games in general continues to be a joy that won’t diminish.
Sibylle Writes Games is a love letter to the joy of gaming through the eyes of a user experience designer.
What to expect:
Game Dev: Logs of the games I’ve worked on
Core Memory Unlocked: A retrospective study on a game I've finished that's heavily affected me
Discover Hour: An exploration of a game’s interface, mechanics and themes
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