Introducing Rufflebutt

In the last post, I mentioned how my daughter had dragged me into playing GW2.   Here is a screenie of Rufflebutt the Barbarian.

She grew up (known as a family in-joke as ThingOne, taken from The Cat in the Hat) with us playing MMO's.  She was 10 years old when Everquest launched, I think we started playing before she turned 11.

At the first, we had just one account, I got it as a gift for my beloved spouse, who had been playing a text MUD available through AOL.  I think my evenings in those days were spent with Mario64 and Ocarina of Time, and so on.

Well, she had a blast (my wife) and I started a toon on her account.  Yes, I know you weren't supposed to do that.  It was a monk, Aquino.   But it soon became clear that This Would Not Do.

So I got my own account.   And the first toon I rolled up on it was our beloved, fabulous redhead.  Although his hair wasn't terribly red, or terribly fabulous given the state of Everquest graphics.

As time marched on Things One and Two became interested in the game.  Apparently they also thought it was a bit weird.  Kids are like that.

Later, as a young adult, she would sit in our living room with her laptop and talk to her friends over Skype, sometimes doing a "tabletop" RPG via IM and talking in voice.   I have danced over voice chat with some of her friends, forging an alliance with them, our mutual dark purpose being her mortification.  I'm not sure I was wholly successful, though.

Now she's off in Art School, though she wants to be an illustrator, not a modeler or game artist.  And playing MMO's on her own.  A few weeks ago, she posted this on Google+:

So tonight we ran a dungeon in Guild Wars 2 ... Now, I generally play MMOs with the vaunted method of "solo EVERYTHING", so I have no idea how to shot dungeon strategy, and all but one of the rest of us hadn't done any of the GW dungeons. The dungeons in guild wars are MUCH harder than normal PVE, and the one we chose, Ascalonian Catacombs, is apparently one of the hardest in the game.

So we died a lot. It was still a ton of fun (and you make some serious bank), but there was much death to be had.

It was at the point where we were switching to a third strategy to fight a particularly ornery pair of bosses that I suddenly remembered my dad doing raids in Everquest and Everquest 2. As a kid who played WoW by pretending no one else playing the game existed (which is still the best way to actually play WoW), it all seemed silly, and sometimes kind of annoying, that we'd have several hours in an evening with he and mom screaming at guildmates over vent as Vox used them as a human yo-yo. How was that possibly fun?

And now, at nearly three in the morning after a dungeon we started ...four hours ago, I just want to say; [Dad], I get it now.

Yesterday, I asked her if it would be OK to post this to TT.  She said yes, but then a few hours later, posted a link to Paint Stains and Video Games, a blog that she had just been inspired to create.  The first post is titled "My Father's Daughter".    In it, she says this:

I got asked if he could quote a post in his blog. My phone rebelled telling him sure whatever. I went and looked up the blog later. I still thought it was kind of dorky. There was a 'create journal' button over in the top corner. 

Being dorky or dumb didn't mean I was immune, clearly.

Dorky? Dumb?  I'm calling her "Serpent's Tooth" from here on.