Jenning & Reece’s HR department moved slower than I would have preferred. As in, I would have signed an employment agreement before leaving that day—I didn’t even need Olivia to slide a slip of paper toward me first with a ludicrous salary handwritten on it. I was prepared to roll with anything. But HR apparently needed at least a couple days to get the paperwork ready.
There was something particularly exquisite about knowing you could play Sparkle Dungeon for a couple days straight without the slightest need to burn some time along the way hustling for work or paying attention to the outside world in any meaningful way. It was time for a rare multiday immersive session, in which significant acts of proper mayhem and celebration could be perpetrated.
It was time for the Queen to call a tourney!
A quick side note about the title “Queen of Sparkle Dungeon.”
When the first Sparkle Dungeon game launched, I rocketed to the top of the leaderboard and snatched the title, holding onto it ever since. In theory, anyone could earn this title, assuming they could somehow displace me on the leaderboard. It was a title, not the name of my character. In the original Sparkle Dungeon, it was the highest-ranking title you could earn as a player, because the title of “Sparkle King” was permanently reserved for Cameron Kelly, who invented the game. (In fact, his full title was “The Once and Future Gleaming King of the Sparkle Realm and All its Glamorous Provinces; Protector of Shine, Blink, and Glow; Guardian of Prism, Crystal and Diamond; and Master Commander of the Glittering Monks of Weaponized Psytrance.”)
As the original game got popular, though, the fact that Queen was the highest rank you could shoot for started to really aggravate some of the Sparkle Bros out there. How dare the game insinuate that the appropriate title for the best player was a feminine title, even though of course none of them would be complaining if the title of Sparkle King was on the table? At that point, the creative team behind the game hadn’t given any interviews and wasn’t a presence on the forums, preferring to stay cloaked in secrecy for as long as they could get away with it. So buzz was high about how they’d respond to the controversy. One reviewer in particular, for a site called Fantasy Radar, would not shut up about it.
Hilariously, a “leaked” copy of Sparkle Dungeon 2 made it into Fantasy Radar’s grimy hands. To the reviewer’s utter dismay, you could only play women avatars. Made him furious and his subsequent review was this ludicrous rant about reverse sexism that went so viral it knocked Fantasy Radar offline for a day and a half. Turns out that he’d received a special build with only one gender option that was designed specifically to troll him.
In the actual release edition of SD2 when it finally came out, you could specify gender from a range of real and imaginary options, or play without a gender, and in that spirit, I wrote in to ask that “Queen of Sparkle Dungeon” be an optional title going forward for anyone holding that rank. Let the person who knocked me off that lofty pedestal someday specify their own title for that rank, with whatever gender implications they chose to reveal. Cameron Kelly released a statement saying he agreed with me, although I didn’t plan to let anyone see this functionality in action for the foreseeable future.
As a result, people started targeting me specifically, pretty aggressively. However, I was not new as a person on this planet, so I was prepared. None of my personally identifiable information was associated with my game account, my IP address was obscured behind an anonymizer, and my in-game chat filters were robust in keeping people from even reaching my attention. I accepted no DMs, except from the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism and a few other close friends I made along the way.
Sparkle Dungeon was not primarily a player-vs-player combat game, but I started getting randomly attacked by roving bands of Sparkle Bros trying to slow me down. The game frequently penalized you for combat against other players, but it imposed higher penalties for instigators than for defenders, so this wasn’t actually a winning proposition for them.
But while I was prepared for hostility, I was much less prepared to develop an actual fanbase. People being angry at me on the internet—I was mostly armored for that. People fawning over me and praising my exploits—well, you could sneak past my defenses that way. Eventually, of course, some of these people turned out to be creeps. I developed a running joke with the sleazoids on my live stream. They kept asking me for nudes and I kept sending them panels from Garfield comics.
But then you’d see self-organizing bands of fans leap to my defense, and you’d see these periodic waves of mutual doxxing until the admins got organized around kickbanning people based on a clear code of conduct. Unlike other game companies, the creators of Sparkle Dungeon displayed little tolerance for harassment of any kind. I didn’t know if they could somehow afford a vast army of human moderators or if their monitoring algorithms were just exceedingly great, but I was definitely relieved.
This was the lens through which I viewed my exploits in the game. I mean, sure it was important to me to stay on top of the game. It was incredibly important to me to stay on top of the game. Above any other concerns, it was important to me to stay on top of the game. By all that was supposedly holy in this wretched cesspool of a universe, it was important to me to stay on top of the game. But as a social experience, the game was important to me, too; it helped me evolve my social awareness little by little, helped me grow into an increasingly confident and vocal thought leader in a chosen community. And I thought this aspect of my experience as a player was probably—maybe—just barely—more important than staying on top of the game.
But yeah, I would still crush you in this game.