Lilly Contino has loved video games ever since her grandfather bought her Pokemon Blue in 1998. In middle school, she spent hours playing World of Warcraft, slipping out of the real world in which she lived as a cisgender boy named Nick and into the multilayered world of her avatar, a pigtailed robotic girl named Lilly. She was just beginning to enter puberty, and Lilly found solace in the game\u2019s parallel reality of quests of combat. She would switch on the game and switch off her own life, which was marked by pain and a great deal of denial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI was just sleepwalking through life,\u201d she says, referencing her childhood and young adulthood. \u201cI didn’t really like myself; I didn’t really take pleasure in many things. I was always acting like there was just something wrong with me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n