This post is one of a series of interviews with members of the COE Community...

Powerful Women: Lady Gamers of Elyria -Gammea

Victoria M. Xildithas

Constant Readers, I promised you interviews with the talented, creative, and influential women gamers in the Elyrian community, and I’m proud to say (FINALLY) the time to fulfill my promise has arrived! There are many stellar nominees with a ton of upvotes, but I’m here today with our first interviewee: Gammea from Heraldo de Elyria.

VMX: First, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. The people of Elyria have spoken, and they want to hear from you. So, let’s get right to it, and we’ll start off easy:

For those who are, somehow, not familiar with you, tell us about yourself. What kingdom (if any) are you with, and what are you doing in the Chronicles of Elyria community that you want everyone to know about?

Gammea: Hello, I’m Gammea, a Spanish girl. I’m one of two Countesses of Tarsis, in the Kingdom of Nirath, and I’ve been following the game since almost the very beginning (September 2015) thanks to Daedhel, my boyfriend. He discovered the game in July, started following it, and poked me until I took a look. I was amazed by the game’s idea, and we joined the community.

Soon, we found out that there wasn’t any information about Chronicles of Elyria in our language so, in November 2015, we launched a humble blog called Heraldo de Elyria (www.heraldodeelyria.com) where we translated all the info we found. And we still are doing it, but now the amount of information and the size of our team are both bigger.

Shortly after, on IRC, Souzou and a few members of the community decided to start the official wiki and I joined them. Only a few weeks later, I poked Maygus to start the Spanish one – the first non-English language official wiki about CoE, and we’re still working on it.

VMX: That’s really impressive work! I hope everyone will check it out, and share it with friends. Now, let’s focus on other games for a minute: How long have you been playing video games, and what got you into them?

G: I’ve been playing videogames since I was a teenager. My first games were Prince of Persia – yes, the first one for PC – FFVI and Pokemon Red; my favorites were Crash Bandicoot 3 and Ratchet & Clank.

What got me into them? Well, my father bought a PC, and my brother and I started to play with the keyboard. We enjoyed how the green letters went up and down on the screen – I was very little then. And when my father brought our first video games I also enjoyed using the MSDOS code to run the games. It was amazing competing with my little brother and we kept at it until college, playing combat games like the Soul Calibur sagas and Tekken. Finally, I discovered roleplay on a Lineage 2 private server where I met many of my friends.

VMX: Besides Chronicles of Elyria what are your three favorite games, and why?

G: While Lineage 2 wasn’t a great game in terms of features and gameplay, I made many good memories there, so it’s on the top of my list. Here I learned about basic MMORPG community features, like roles and classes, etc.

Age of Empires was my first strategy game, and I spent lots of hours there playing LAN sessions with my brother and cousins. The three things I loved doing most on AoE was ‘Wololize’ people, cheating codes (how do you turn this thing on?), and rebuilding my civilization after being left with just one villager.

The Sims: my boyfriend hates this game; he says I just play it to build houses and torture people, which isn’t all true. Yes, I did a lot of experiments to learn about the game and its features, but I also made lovely houses – between “experiments”.

VMX: How many Sim tombstones do you think you racked up?

G: I am not sure, 6 to 8 per family depending on the experiment, because many of them were to know the minimum resources they need to survive and how long. But I am a lovely person - I swear! Sometimes I tested how quickly I could make them fall in love, etc. So, they didn’t all need to die every time.

VMX: Hahaha, I was being silly - but I have to admit, I did imagine a little Sim graveyard, and you becoming an expert at games with Death.

But back to the game we’re all in love with. How did you find out about Chronicles of Elyria, and what about it captured your imagination?

G: Daedhel’s fault. He poked me for months to watch Galavant and take a look on the game’s website. When I read the information about the game and watched Galavant in just one night, inspiration came to me, and I realized that this game is the GAME that I’ve always dreamed. The reasons? You know them!

VMX: What sorts of things are you looking forward to doing with your character(s) in Chronicles of Elyria?

G: First of all, I am going to manage our county (a Spanish-speaking community), so I assume I am going to spend most of my time working for this project to make it work. In addition, there are few professions that caught my attention: architect, scribe, animal breeding, alchemy in a medical way, botany, and their research.

VMX: It sounds like you’ll be busy! Do you have a favorite gaming story to tell us?

G: When I started to play Lineage 2 I chose to play as mage because it was a different thing from what I was doing in other games and it was very fun, but then, someone invited me to a raid where everyone were skilled and had a higher level than me. I saw how their lives dropped down and instinctively I cast the basic heal spell of my class. That day I discovered my true position in MMOs, as healer. As result, my friends call me ‘the healing mage’.

VMX: There can be lots of controversial discussion surrounding the topic of women in gaming, what’s your take on what it’s like to be a female gamer in what is often called a ‘man’s market’?

G: Surprisingly, even with the Spanish community still being sexist, women have a strong presence in numbers and often run guilds, projects, teams and fansites, especially in the roleplay community. I was very shocked when I realized the international community has a lower average of female players. I always thought that it was the opposite – as it is in many other things.

In the Spanish community women are, step by step, achieving a normal position, but there are still many fights to win the war. I really hope someday we don’t talk about this topic because it won’t be necessary anymore. But it’s true that many male players contacted Daedhel and not me – even though we’re running the same guilds as equals – because he is a man and I am a woman. There is still work to do.

Here in CoE, I’ve met more men than women, even if they are going to play a female character, but many of these women are very active in the community, so I am very happy with your initiative to show what we are doing for this game and its public. A very positive thing is, here, I haven’t found any remarkable sexist behavior so this means to me that this community is on the right path.

VMX: That’s definitely one of the things that makes me love this community as well. Continuing in the same vein: I think it can be easy to focus on the negatives of being a woman gamer, certainly many other articles go that route, but I wonder if you can tell me a positive story, or what you think is the most positive thing about being a woman in gaming?

G: I am a very lucky person because I’ve been always surrounded by women – and not only with men – on MMOs, and that has helped to know this world from many different perspective and experiences. This means I’ve always thought that this normal, women playing side by side with men. Thanks to that, I introduced other women into gaming in healthy communities with both genders, and not just females or males. I really hope people understand that this the way to enjoy game the most, without sexist nonsense.

VMX: I wholeheartedly agree, and thank you for your work in bringing more women into healthy communities. Before we have to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to tell my Constant Readers that we haven’t already covered? Here’s the place for shameless self-promotion or recruitment if you like.

G: You invited me to do it so: To any spanish speaking reader you have, they are absolutely welcomed to join Heraldo de Elyria and help to spread the word of CoE in Spanish, to make it easier for those who haven’t mastered English, but want to know more about this fantastic game.

VMX: I hope they’ll join up as well, and I’ll make sure to spread the word, too. So here’s my final question: What do you want YOUR legacy in Elyria to be?

G: In game, I would like to try to recreate the original man tribe following the lessons from Dune’s Bene Gesserit Order playing with genetics and cross-breeding. I know it’s possible, sure, absolutely…It’s not a dream! I will show you all!

In the community, if any reason I wouldn’t be able to continue my work on Heraldo de Elyria and the Wiki, I really hope that they both continue helping players with a different team.

VMX: Gammea, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview; I wish you the very best of luck with all your endeavors…and experiments.

Constant Readers, I hope you’ll get out there and start sharing Gammea’s work with your friends. As always, remember Elyrians: If you can’t be good, be good at it.

Read the rest of the series! Check out my interviews with:

Vye, Producer at Soulbound Studios

Eltanin, Countess of Dore of the Kingdom of Tryggr

Kitlandria, Editor in Chief of the Bordweall Chronicles