1. Once rollerbladed 32 miles in a single day.

2. Uncannily good at Beat Saber and Dance Dance Revolution.

3. Plays a dozen instruments: piano, flute, piccolo, acoustic/electric/bass guitar, banjolele, ukulele, pipa, recorder, ocarina, and mandolin*.

Little 10-year-old Amanda grips a gargantuan, gray N64 controller, watching the credits of THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME. She's just beaten her first video game - on her own - and takes in a realization as hundreds of names fade in and out over the sweeping vistas of Hyrule:

"People made this game.

...*I* could be a person who makes games."

So sown was a seed. That seed snaked tendrils through adolescence - an after-school education of story-writing and game-playing - and burst ground to bud in a Creative Writing/Computer Science double major. Budding begat busy buzzing bees - a QA internship, games journalism gigs, freelance game writing and narrative design for notable names, corporate roles with Hasbro, Backflip Studios, Wooga, Tactile, A Thinking Ape.

Now I stretch to the sun, a storyflower. A person who makes games.

But Ocarina of Time was more than a career motivator; it was an acutely necessary childhood escape. A place of belonging, where I had sway, agency, and - importantly - the power to change the world for the better. I wasn't a bullied introvert with a disruptive home life; I was the heralded hero of Hyrule, and people were counting on me.

If even one moment of one game that I've worked on transports a person out of their daily tumult and into a place of hope and purpose, then I've done my job as a storyteller and game developer. That's what I'm in for: to lift people up. To help them escape into a world of awe, connection, raison d'être.

Whether I'm incubating a fledgling world, shading in the rough outline of a character, weighing words in a heavy scene, zooming in to hide an environmental Easter egg, breaking down systems to build up a better user experience - I'm in it for the mission. I'm in to lift people up.