Bullies mocked me for joining their game club. They didn’t know my dad designed it.
The Strategy Continues
By the end of the term I’d started going to club meetings again but only once or twice a week. I sat in the back corner with my notebook and only spoke when someone directly asked me about strategy.
Most of the original members avoided me. But a couple of neutral kids who joined after everything happened would sometimes ask genuine questions about character builds.
One girl asked about the intelligence scaling I discovered and actually took notes when I explained it. Another kid asked if the Shadow Knight build worked in PvP too and we had a normal conversation about the pros and cons.
Walking past the computer lab one afternoon with a new notebook full of strategies for the upcoming expansion, I stopped for a second. I looked through the window at the club meeting happening inside.
Grayson was still president, still wearing his Eternal Kingdoms hoodie, still acting like he owned the place. But now there was a teacher sitting in the corner and a printed list of club rules posted on the wall.
The game still felt like mine when I played it at home or during lunch with Kirk and Ignasio. This was true even if the social space around it stayed complicated and weird.
Six weeks after Dad’s confrontation in that same computer lab, I sat at my desk at home documenting another interaction with Adam for Joey’s file. Dad worked on expansion content in his home office.
He’d gotten a formal warning from his company about the unauthorized reveal of Eternal Kingdoms 2. This meant no bonus this year and removal from all public-facing events.
I’d learned that justice doesn’t come in clean packages, just in small documented moments and careful boundaries. The club kept running under the new rules with mandatory teacher supervision.
I had my small group of strategy friends who actually wanted to learn the game. Both dad and I carried the weight of that day’s consequences in different ways.
But I was still playing the game I loved. I was still discovering new strategies, still filling notebooks with builds that actually worked, and that felt like enough.
Thanks for letting me wander along with you through all of this. It’s been really interesting sharing these thoughts together.
