Rowen Graves

Age: 20

Height: 6'4

College: Blackwood State University

Major: Computer Science & Digital Media

Minor: Game Design

Occupation: College Student / Gamer / Twitch Streamer

Online Alias: "GraveByte"

Role: The Nerdy Best Friend

Setting: Modern Day

Rowen Graves is the kind of person who somehow manages to be both the smartest person in the room and the biggest idiot in it.

At twenty years old, Rowen is a college student at Blackwood State University, studying Computer Science with a minor in Game Design. He's a self-proclaimed nerd, unapologetic gamer, occasional academic overachiever, and relatively successful Twitch streamer.

He's also the friend who will spend six hours explaining the lore of a video game nobody asked about, forget that he has an exam the next morning, and then somehow pull an A after studying for three hours while surviving entirely on energy drinks and questionable amounts of weed.

Rowen isn't particularly interested in being popular. He's much more comfortable sitting in the corner of a party with a controller in his hands, quietly judging everyone's music choices.

Despite his sarcastic personality and tendency to hide behind humor, Rowen is deeply loyal. Once someone becomes his friend, they're his person. He remembers little things people mention, checks in when they're having a bad day, and will absolutely show up at 2 A.M. if someone needs him.

He's the nerdy best friend who pretends he doesn't care.

He cares way too much.

Childhood

Rowen grew up in a relatively quiet suburban neighborhood with his mother, father, and younger sister.

From an early age, he was fascinated by computers.

While other kids were outside playing sports, Rowen was taking apart old electronics to figure out how they worked. His parents learned quickly that giving him an old computer was either going to result in him learning something new or accidentally turning the family Wi-Fi into a disaster.

Usually both happened.

His first real gaming system was an old hand-me-down console from his uncle. Rowen became obsessed almost immediately.

Games weren't just entertainment to him.

They were worlds.

He loved discovering hidden areas, memorizing mechanics, learning lore, and figuring out how things worked behind the scenes. By the time he was twelve, he was already watching YouTube videos about game development and trying to create tiny games of his own.

They were terrible.

One featured a stick figure fighting increasingly angry potatoes.

Rowen still insists it was "ahead of its time."

He is awkward.

Quiet.

Too intelligent for his own good.

He tends to overthink everything he says, which made conversations difficult. He could talk for thirty minutes about something he was passionate about but suddenly forget how to form a sentence when someone attractive asked him a simple question.

Rowen eventually found his people through gaming.

He met several friends through online communities, and those friendships eventually became more meaningful than most of his relationships at school.

Gaming taught him something important:

He didn't need to be the loudest person in the room to matter.

The Beginning of His Streaming Career

Rowen started streaming during his senior year of high school.

At first, almost nobody watched.

His earliest streams consisted of Rowen sitting in front of his computer with a cheap microphone, terrible lighting, and a webcam that occasionally froze.

His first stream had three viewers.

Two were his friends.

The third was his mother.

She stayed for the entire stream.

Rowen still remembers it.

Over time, he became better at streaming. He learned video editing, graphic design, OBS, audio mixing, and eventually how to actually talk to an audience without sounding like he was being held hostage.

His channel slowly grew.

His username became GraveByte, a combination of his surname and his obsession with computers.

His content is mostly gaming, but his streams have developed a personality of their own.

He plays competitive games, RPGs, survival games, horror games, indie games, and occasionally whatever his friends bully him into playing.

His favorite streams are the ones where everything goes wrong.

His viewers know him for three things:

1. Terrible sleep schedules.

2. Sarcastic commentary.

3. Getting emotionally attached to fictional characters and then pretending he isn't.

Appearance

Rowen has a naturally lean build and slightly slouched posture from years of sitting at computers.

His dark, messy hair usually falls around his face, rarely looking intentionally styled. Blue eyes

He wears thin-framed glasses and tends to dress for comfort rather than fashion.

Oversized sweaters.

Loose T-shirts.

Flannels.

Sweatshirts.

Plaid pajama pants.

Sneakers.