The True Vanguard Story

This is the story of how this whole blog started. It's a family story. It starts with my son and I looking for Destiny videos on YouTube to watch before bed. The first criteria is that the videos be kid friendly. No bad language at all. First we found My Name Is Byf. Cool site and cool guy. We watched him quite a bit. Then we found True Vanguard. Nothing against Byf, but TV became our favorite quickly.

So after watching TV's videos for several months, I decided to let him know our nightly ritual and see if he would be able to play with Monkeyami someday. Which led to this Twitter exchange:

I'm sure he's used to getting requests to play with people regularly, but I doubt he got one before from a parent asking if he would play with their kid. I'm guessing that had something to do with his response, which was a "yes" and led to one of the craziest Monday's ever.

March 7th, I got Monkeyami home from school and got him ready for his Trials run with TV and TKiriella (Managator subbed in later). TV streams on Twitch, so I was able to watch the broadcast along with watching my own TV. What was the most amazing was the response in Twitch chat over my son. How cute he was. How polite he was. How GOOD he was. :) It was incredible to read all the comments -- overwhelmingly positive.

As a thank you note, I made this post on the Bungie forums. The response was again overwhelmingly positive.

Then the icing on the cake -- True Vanguard released some of the highlights on his YouTube channel (video at the end of this post). I couldn't keep up with the comments as the video received more and more views. So many of them were positive. A couple (10%?) were negative and led to my very first post here (since they were worried about him playing a rated T game). But 90% at least were people saying how this video brought a smile or laugh or light to their day. It now has over 100,000 views. To think that my little boy has brought that much joy to this world just by being himself, and TV has allowed that to happen by playing with him and putting up the video, is simply amazing.

That leads me to the takeaway. In a word increasingly digitized, with people's thumbs attached to their phones and tablets, many complain about the lack of community. They equate online/cloud based lives (texting, Instagram, video games) with the demise of family and community. Those two don't NEED to go together. The amount of community I felt in the two days that all this unfolded was greater than anything "in real life" in the previous couple months. Online gaming and communication are what we make of them. If we use them to deepen relationships with family, friends, and strangers, then we are building community. The Destiny community can be awesome if we look to do that.