There is a version of my gaming story that fits in one paragraph of How I got here. This is the other version, the one with the screenshots, because I kept them all and they deserve better than a folder on my desktop.

Where the gamer half lived

Start in 2022. Crypto is in a crater, and I am not trading, I am in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, healing raids like it is 2008 again. I have played World of Warcraft since I was a kid in Burning Crusade. I think a lot of crypto people have a version of this story they do not tell, the game that taught them what a world with its own economy feels like. Mine taught me early. Gold, auction houses, server politics, guild drama. Everything crypto later sold as revolutionary, I had already lived through with a night-elf healer.

The climb

Blocklords, January 2024. I have told the story of the ad and the hero elsewhere. What I have not told is that I showed up to Season 1 late, ranked somewhere around fortieth when I finally got going, and decided that was unacceptable. I treated the game the way I treat everything, as a system with numbers under it, and numbers are my home field. By the end of Season 1 I was at the top. In Season 2 I won outright.

The win was not mine alone. Two players, Bane and Chilli, shared a spreadsheet with me mid-season, and that spreadsheet became the war room. We ran the numbers on everything, resources, timings, and eventually on our biggest rival, a famous account whose posted results kept not adding up. We worked out the hours per day his pace would require. I will just say the sheet did not believe him, and the sheet had been right about everything else.

They gave me a crown for it. My hero Bjorn, the same 6.8 ETH noob buy from the ad, ran through the following season wearing it. There is no feeling in gaming quite like logging in and seeing the game itself admit you won.

The guild

Web3Long started as a name I liked because it reads two ways, web3 long, the position, and we belong, the point. We flew the flag across four games. Blocklords, where the crowns came from. Guild of Guardians on Immutable. Medieval Empires on Polygon, where I held lands, and one of those deeds now hangs in this archive as a work in its own right, because the guild years are part of the collection's provenance too. RavenQuest came later, four lands placed on launch week, a stronghold, the whole settler routine.

And the memes. God, the memes. TomTomTom made most of the good ones, an endless stream of them through every war and every patch, and two of his actual artworks hang in this gallery now, which still makes me smile. A community member built a fan site nobody asked for. Someone made a gif. When people ask what web3 games gave me that regular games did not, the honest answer is nothing, except that the people were realer, because the stakes were.

The tuition

Now the other column of the ledger, because this story is worthless without it. We tried launching a coin once, a meme wizard thing on Base. It failed hard, I lost real money, and I learned exactly what I was paying to learn, that I am a collector and a builder, not a token launcher. A guild from the Philippines scammed me. A player I trusted, one of my own, stole from me, and that one cost more in trust than in tokens. Most of the games themselves died, one by one, utility evaporating a month after it was sold. I made a meme about it at the time, pay to win, pay to lose, and I stand by it. Most web3 games extract and fail. The winners you hear about are survivorship bias wearing a crown.

What it was for

Here is the accounting that matters. The games gave me people, TomTomTom and Bane and Chilli and a hundred names I still see in my mentions. They gave me proof that I would grind for something I loved and proof of what it feels like when a community curdles, which is the exact knowledge that made me recognize a healthy one when I finally walked into the art world. And they gave me the habit of keeping receipts, screenshots, spreadsheets, records, which is the habit this entire museum is built on.

I do not play much anymore. But the crown is in the archive, the deeds are on the walls, the memes are in this story, and the guild name still reads two ways. We belong. We did.