- Sun Apr 05, 2020 12:16:10 pm
#22860
So where I am at about this game at this particular moment, Sunday morning, is I have some odd emotions. When it comes to gaming, I was heavily invested in these between 2008-2010. In those three years I played ORG after ORG after ORG. I was a strong player. I had played online games when I was like 13 or 14, but they were never closed ID games, and I got a private message on Survivor Sucks from poody out of the blue one day when I was a freshmen in college in early 2008 asking me if I wanted to be a part of this game. I found out that I was the last confirmed member of the game and I would be playing under an alias - Melinda from (whatever season Melinda was on I truly do not remember, the one with Cirie I think... omg Aras was so hot btw). My freshmen year of college at the University of Minnesota I had gotten a solo dorm room (not by choice, just how it worked out), and I really hadn't made many friends at that point. So for a total Survivor nerd like me who had plenty of free time alone in his dorm, I found myself LOVING this new world I had found. Stranded 2 (Aruba I think?) was my first game of this type, and I did really well, nearly won it.
After that I met some people in this community on AIM and ended up forming some insanely intimate relationships with people from all over the world. At 19 I was still in the closet, a virgin, had never gotten drunk/high I was this good boy who always did what he was told, strict religious parents, and an incredibly driven person. I had gotten into one of the top business schools in the country because in high school I was a good student, involved in like every club imaginable, a star athlete, captain of the soccer team, knowledge/quiz bowl... I got voted Most Likely to Succeed my Senior year. So I have always been an extremely competitive, highly driven person. And as I have gotten older I have discovered that that drive I had so much of growing up was all to cover up how terrified I was that I was not enough. I always had something to prove. And that same behavior pattern showed up when I found the world of gaming... I look back on that period of my life and see how much gaming fed my ego. All I cared about during that period of my life was being considered the greatest gamer among Survivor fanatics in the gaming community from around the world. And I won a LOT. I got to the finals A LOT. And I took games WAY seriously. Like I recall losing Aruba in a close 3-3-1 vote to Courtney (Misty broke the tie in her favor) and just being irate at the people who didn't vote for me, screaming that it was a bitter jury. All I could see was my own perspective, which was that my game play was brilliant, the best, and everyone who doesn't think so is a complete moron. Then I played All-Stars, came in second this time in a 3-2-2 vote to Courtney, and I had similar bitterness and righteousness. I was less mad because I actually liked Courtney a lot, but there were other ORGs where this happened as well... I played extremely cut throat games and figured people should just respect my cut throat-ness and not the relationship side of things. As time went on I got better at balancing the cut throat with the softness needed to win, which led me to winning in rivals against T-bird who reminded me of my younger self.
I believe the Stranded season I won (12 apparently) was one of the last ORGs I played before abandoning the community completely in 2011. I had been very active in GTS (Games That Suck) and had lots of really amazing online friends as well as plenty of enemies. In those years winning awards for ORGing was SO important to me. Like in my mind at the time I FOR SURE should have won ORGer of the year... or winner of the year or whatever all those award categories were... And I don't think I won a lot of them and probably got depressed by it. I have to look back at that time of life and laugh at myself a bit. But also have compassion... I was severely depressed and ORGs were my escape from reality. I had studied a semester in Spain in 2009 and when I returned to the US I had extreme depression. I would stay up late ORGing and barely go to class, I failed a few classes because I just stopped going. I was binge drinking a ton. Went on academic probation. All the while I was navigating coming out of the closet with a right wing, religious family where it was not ok. I had always been hyper masculine and a driven athlete and student to distract from what was really going on inside. When I got back from Spain I had discovered the world of online hookup sites and was having sex for the first time in my life. Lots of it. With my like minded people from across the world who were gay, closeted, horny, survivor nerds like myself, I had people to talk to who understood me. Some of my ORG friends got me through some of the hardest experiences of my life like my parents outing me and telling me I need to go to conversion therapy or I'm going to hell. My ORG friends were the only people who I could talk to and just completely be myself with. They got me through some really awful times in my life and I learned so much from many of these people who lives hundreds and thousands of miles away from me.
I was graduating in May of 2011 after recovering myself from an awful Junior year. I had a job right out of school that was pretty demanding, and I tried playing one last ORG that summer but I had lost my drive for ORGing. I think it was the only time ever in my 3 year ORGing career where I went out of the game pre-merge. My career was the most important thing in my life at that time, and I couldn't balance ORGing with work like I could with school. When I am into something I am like either ALL IN or not at all. I think it's that drive that had me have so much success in ORGs. Plus I am highly intuitive and have been studying game theory since childhood. With my career getting more and more demanding, I sort of just abandoned the ORG world completely, including the relationships I had created with people through chat. My real life friendships started becoming more important, and I was afraid of getting sucked back into isolating myself from real people so I sort of just up and abandoned the ORG world completely.
2011 to 2015 my whole life focus was on my career where I was a workaholic, taking that drive I had in ORGs to climbing up the corporate ladder, promotion after promotion leading to working more and more and harder and harder in a high pressure job. When not working my entire focus of life was gay volleyball, getting shitfaced with my gay friends, getting shit faced with my work friends, hooking up, doing party drugs on weekends with my work friends... yeah that was pretty much what most of my life consisted of during that time. Had a lot of fun. But definitely was taking a toll and it was another way to escape my depression.
2015 was a huge turning point in my life. I fell in love, I quit my unfulfilling job, I tore my ACL and had major surgery on my knee to repair it, my parents met my boyfriend who is the same age as them, I was taking personal development courses and starting to take major risks in my life. Realized a lot of my friendships were pretty superficial and after I tore my ACL I found myself isolating myself again. Since I was not working at the time, in early 2016 I played in an ORG for the first time in 5 years... it was Into the Blue Hong Kong. I ended up winning it! And when I came here I realized that Stephanie in this game was Jay in Hong Kong, who I beat in the finals in a close 5-4 vote! Like Courtney he and I were not aligned, in fact he tried voting me out at final 4 but I forced a 2-2 tie and won the tiebreaker to get into the finals. I really came into that game just wanting to have fun, never intended to win it. Our tribe sucked and went into the merge in the minority. At final 9 it was just me and one other person from my original tribe (there was no swap) and 7 from the majority tribe. From that point forward they started turning in eachother and I was able to sneak my way into the finals and winning. I was truly stunned that I was able to accomplish that after not ORGing for 5 years. While the game was a lot of fun, it also took a big toll on my relationship as it was time consuming and when I do things I tend to become quite obsessive.
So since then I have played a few ORGs here and there but I really have not had my full heart into them and have sort of just approached them from being a highly entertaining, crazy, troll... I haven't played in and ORG with the intention of winning since that game in 2016. I've just been playing as an outlet to have fun in.
So I find myself here in this game, and for the first time in my life since college I have plenty of free time to devote to it. But to be honest, my depression since this coronavirus madness started has been coming and going. This has been incredibly disruptive for all of us and we are all coping in different ways. I am sharing all of this because I was really looking forward to this game before it started and just having my toes dipped back into the gaming world waters was exciting. But the last few days I am feeling kinda depressed again for the first time in a LONG time, and I had this thought like... wtf am I doing... Like I said I am fairly intuitive, and I just get this sense that I am too ancient, too out of the loop, too unconnected to really have a shot here.
My intuition tells me that Loveita, Russell, Joaquin, and Val are all like really tight outside of this. I could just be being overly paranoid about it, but while I'd like to think I am making connections here that will keep me safe for at least a few rounds (which I am actually not totally sure I even have been successful at that), I have a lot of self doubt about my chances to really go deep in this game. If it were a closed ID game I would say I absolutely could win it all if I put my best foot forward. But this being an all stars season full of people with connections that I do not have, and the fact that I also do not know who has connections with who... I feel at a major disadvantage. Courtney created an alliance with me, Joaq, and Loveita... I feel I can trust Courtney fully in this game, but I just have this intuition that Joaq/Loveita have a ton of connections and I don't feel as though they are really going to have my back over a lot of other people here long term. As much as I'd like to pull Cristina/Catalie/Stephanie/Courtney together to take out a major threat in this game, it would likely blow up in my face... so I feel almost paralyzed to make a move here. Sort of like I am damned if I play it safe and damned if I don't... I truly think I need to rely on a lot of luck to have a chance at going far in this game.
So I guess I just needed to get all of that off my chest to fully be here. Regardless of if I go super far or not here, I am grateful for this opportunity at this point in my life to reflect on my life. Just sitting here this morning writing out all these thoughts in my head was worth playing this game. Of course I would love to win it. But I realistically don't think the odds of me going far are good here. Could just be my self doubt kicking in, but I sense that I am on the bottom. I think likely Mookie is in worse shape than me, and likely he will go tonight unless I am being totally blindsided... beyond that I don't have a great feeling, and I know even less people on the opposite tribe so a switch scenario could end up being reallllly bad for me. For now I am just going to continue to do my best to suck up to people and hope for the best. Not being able to hide behind a character for the first time since I won this game many years ago is sort of scary to me. Makes me feel vulnerable. When I won this I had tons of connections that I was able to use to get me to the end. I do not have that here. Most of these people know little or nothing about me other than things they may or may not have heard about me... and that person I was in 2010 is not even close to the same person I am a decade later. So this should be an interesting journey. I don't know if it will be a long or a short one, but hopefully I can put my best foot forward and not just say "fuck it" and give up... because I sort of just want to do that... just roll the dice, hope for the best, see what happens. I think all there is for me to do is just authentically share myself with people and if they find me threatening, or too much, or whatever, they'll vote me out and that will be that. I'm going to use this game as an opportunity to see sides of myself I'm not ordinarily present to.
Thank you for reading. I know this was a lot. I feel a lot better now having gotten that out of my head and into words on a screen in a forum... Man life is weird as fuck.
