How did you play as a child?

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Good to see you again too! Instead of dogs, most of my plushies are parrots. Big special interest when I was younger, because they're so colourful (I'm visually impaired so parrots were one of the first things I latched onto when I was very young). Recently, I've been getting into peacocks too.

I did lots of ‘atypical gendered’ activities for a young girl.

I was highly physical and I was strongly drawn to bike riding, climbing, rollerblading and ended up skateboarding from the age of 12. I spent hours out the front of my house skateboarding on the new asphalt and at skateparks. For a while we had a vacant block next door and myself and the street kids built bmx tracks and jumps together. I used to trampoline with my street friend every afternoon after school. I also grew up on the coast so swimming and fishing were frequent activities.

My family had a few close friends and they were mostly boys. Together we played chasey (tag), cops and robbers, hide and seek, and occasionally video games together such as Nintendo 64 and some PC games. I feel lucky to have not been brought up entirely in the tech age as once ‘gaming’ hit when I was around 18, that’s all my friends and I did together rather than doing outdoor activities.

I was a social kid but I avoided friendships with girls and was often bullied by girls at school. Imaginative play never made sense to me and I was always interested in goal oriented, physical activities done alongside a friend. I never played team sports because… well socially that was hard.

When I was solo I loved to read, research and my mother commented at how fastidiously clean and organised I was.

Personly, I was most of the time walking around and imagining battle, or story in my head while doing the explosion noises and everything like that

Even before Star Trek, when the other kids wanted to play games like "Cops & Robbers" or "Cowboys & Indians", I wanted to play games like "Alien Ambassador Visits Earth".

^^ I always have a big laugh at stories about Alien landings that are like those of European explorers in the age of sail. All the BEMs in my stories use their radios to get diplomatic recognition and landing clearance.

At recess at Elementary School, when all the other kids were playing tether-ball or other such things, I was re-enacting the "Back to the Future" trilogy or pretending to be riding a theme park attraction I made up.

I didn’t. I had my nose in a book most of the time.

From what I remember, I spent my time trying to create useful things from the limited things I had access to (we were somewhat poor; didn't have many toys, tools and materials to play with), learn how to do things more skillfully (including fighting), move as fast as possible, explore, do experiments, or just learn things in general. I was competitive, but not combative. I played pretend a lot. I loved reading stories. First graphic stories like comic books, then novels once I learned the joy of reading them.

I hated arbitrary puzzles, but I loved figuring out meaningful things. In grade school I spent a lot of time tinkering with the DOS prompt for purpose of playing video games. If I had access to a programming textbook, I would have taught myself a programming language, maybe even machine language. I knew that you could hack games by messing with machine code, but I had no idea how to figure any of it out. The best my school had was some books with pre-made code to make super-simple games, and my father eventually bought me a book about the basics of MS-DOS by the time I had figured most of it out.

I wish I had a linux system to tinker with growing up

Oh yeah, and I did a lot of sport-ish stuff with friends, from tag to bike racing to street hockey and golf.

Except for my obsession with novels and computers at a young age, I was pretty normal.

I have a twin and two older sisters so there was always someone to play with growing up. My twin often wanted to role play, which with me would last two minutes at the most because I'd get confused and wouldn't know what to say or do.

I didn't understand how to share really, Mum always had to remind me to share what I had with my twin.

When we were about 10 or so, we'd get invited by the kids down the street to play with them. They liked pretend play which was foreign to me so I'd just end up annoying them. Soon they'd ask my twin to play but not me.

I was lucky enough to have She-Ra's crystal castle as a Christmas present but all I liked doing with it was taking it apart and putting it back together. My other favourite things were Matchbox cars - I used to like lining them up by colour.

Yeah, I could never understand pretend play. And if I'm asked to do it now, I still can't. My imagination is very limited.

Books were my friend as soon as I could read. They were used to calm me after a meltdown. Mum would keep some books I hadn't read on hand for those situations.

As a teenager, I got more active. Bike riding made me feel good so I did that a lot.