Video games have always been a part of my life — I was born in 1995, so games were well established as a childhood pastime by the time I was old enough to play them. But as a young teen, I pushed gaming to the side as a hobby, especially single-player games. Playing AAA console games in your free time wasn’t considered girly, which was hugely important in my middle school in 2007. Worse, boys were better at gaming than girls — or at least that’s what they told me.

Nonetheless, my father had been teaching me to play first-person shooters and RPGs since I was a toddler, and I knew my way around a breadth of games from my childhood Sega and Nintendo consoles. It never occurred to me that I could be good at games, though, nor that I could claim the hobby as my own. But in 2008, I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas, outfitted with a handful of AAA games that the GameStop employee surely told my parents to buy. And then it was all over — especially once I booted up........

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