I’ve been a gamer in one form or another for a very long time, and this page covers my history with that!

nethack

My earliest long-running gaming experience, for those of you old enough to remember it or those of you into retro games who may have discovered it, is Nethack. Which, despite being almost as old as I am, is still getting code updates. I love that to bits. So you’ll periodically see my posting about my Nethack adventures here.

mushes

After that, my next major gaming love, between 1992 and 2005, was playing on a bunch of different MUSHes. If you don’t know what a MUSH is, it stands for Multi-User Shared Hallucination. Think of it as like an MMO, only text-based, and where all the roleplay was done by people writing out their roleplay. I played on several MUSHes, most notably:

• Two Moons MUSH: My highest profile MUSH, this one was based on Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest series. I played a whole bunch of characters, including Rayek and Mender who appeared in the comics, and I also led a tribe of Wolfrider and other characters, called the Willowholt. And for much of my history there, I was also one of the game’s wizards, i.e., administrators.
• PernMUSH: As you might guess from the name, this one was based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern novels.
• CrystalMUSH: More Anne McCaffrey; this one was based on her Crystal Singer novels.
• Star Wars MUSH: I played not only my main Shenner here, but also none other than Han Solo for a while.
• AetherMUSH: This one had an original setting, and I had four characters there, most notably Faanshi the healer and Julian the thief.

I got into a long-running habit of recording any roleplay my characters did in logs, and I have a large archive of those logs to this day. Which I maintain here on this site.

My experience playing on MUSHes contributed heavily to my eventually releasing my own fiction. AetherMUSH in particular is notable as the place where I created the original versions of Faanshi and Julian, who appeared (with many modifications) as two of the three main characters in my Rebels of Adalonia books.

elder scrolls

Last but not least, I fell in love with Skyrim, many years after it originally came out, in 2022. I fell in love with it so hard that I have since gone on to run many Skyrim playthroughs, as well as expanding my Elder Scrolls love to other games in the Elder Scrolls franchise. I spun up a whole separate website to document my adventures in Tamriel: Anna Plays Skyrim.

The header on this very page pays homage to my very first Skyrim character, Alarrah the Bosmer. The graphic is from one of my very first screenshots of her, when she was in Riverwood very early in her playthrough.