When it comes to identity, what do you consider yourself? A musician? A reader? A lover of pop culture? Despite video games being present in my life longer than any of these, I never really thought of myself as a 'gamer'. As a kid, my days were spent playing my Nintendo DSi and trying to draw poorly rendered editions of popular Hatena flipnotes (a record of 5 stars, I'd like to thank the Academy), but to say that I was a gamer while playing 'Hannah Montana: The Movie' was quite the stretch.

Then came 2011 – while everyone was preparing for the supposed end of the world as we know it, I was busy preparing for another galactic threat in a fictional universe: Mass Effect 2.

Bored with beating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's campaign for the tenth time in a row, I had no interest in playing Mass Effect 2 that came with my Xbox 360 as a Christmas present in 2010. Reading the back cover of the game every once in a while, I figured that it would be some boring game that 10-year-old me just wouldn't get, which turned out to be half-right when I saw one character, Miranda Lawson, and forgot about defeating... uh, the big bad evil machines. Looking back, maybe my odd World War Two phase in the fourth grade and fascination with the military unknowingly prepared me for it. Maybe it was because of my subconscious crush on Yvonne Strahovski. Mass Effect sat untouched for months until I wanted to see for myself who the woman in the white catsuit was.