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About

January 2019. Car selfie.

Chris Mackey, PhD/ABD was born in Harrisburg, PA.  She attended Emmanuel Baptist Christian Academy in Mechanicsburg, PA, graduating as Valedictorian in 1995.  She then attended Maranatha Baptist University where she graduated with a degree in Secondary Education in the discipline of speech in December of 1999.

After graduating from college, Chris moved across country to Los Angeles, CA to pursue a career in acting; however, acting was not in her cards.  In September of 2010, Chris enrolled with now-defunct online university, Jones International University, and earned her MA in Business Communication with a specialization in leadership development.  She graduated suma cum laude in December of 2012.  The following year, she began her doctoral program with University of the Rockies (now Ashford University) in the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.  Focusing on training and e-learning, Chris further specialized her studies and research to pursue her passion: Gaming.  She has maintained a 3.94 GPA and is a member of the Golden Key International Honours Society, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the Society for Creative Anachronism (even though that is more focused on medieval research than I/O studies.  Everyone needs a hobby).

Currently, Chris is working on her dissertation study.  The focus is the effect of virtual versus traditional gaming media on the perception of personal problem-solving skills and the perception of team effectiveness.  She anticipates graduation in 2019.

Chris has been playing video games since she was about 4 years old, starting with an Intelevision console that was given to her by extended family.  From there, she went on to the Atari system and Nintendo before getting bogged down with homework from high school.  In her senior year of college, she discovered internet-chat based role playing games in the form of Vampire: The Masquerade and a couple home-brewed settings.  Once she graduated from college, she found Dungeons & Dragons and began playing with several groups of friends fairly regularly.  After she moved to California, she began to get more involved in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Dark Ages of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and City of Heroes/Villains.

Current games include virtual tabletops for Starfinder (Discord + FantasyGrounds), In Nomine (Discord + D20Pro), Esper Genesis (Discord + D20Pro), and Sacrifice (Discord + D20Pro); traditional settings for Pathfinder, and Dungeons & Dragons 5e; Playstation 3 games; Nintendo 3DS games, and various computer games (Minecraft, Overwatch, Age of Mythology, GTA V, etc).