by Megan Clark

Created on: December 08, 2008

The truth is I'm not a gaming mom, I'm a hardcore endgame raiding gaming mom where GM has a dual meaning. I am also the daughter of a gaming mom, wife to a hardcore gaming husband and the mother of a casual gaming daughter. Gaming has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects of my life since my childhood hours spent gaming with my mother. When we got our first Nintendo in the 1980s, our shared love of gaming usually culminated in arguments over whose turn it was to play, but as PCs became available, our shared gaming love grew into a love of computers and online gaming. Our tastes are different...Mom played Asheron's Call while I was pking in Ultima Online. When my mom was running tournaments on Microsofts MSN Gaming Zone, I was running player guilds in UO, Shadowbane, and World of Warcraft, but our shared love for our games and our extensive lists of on-line friends was a bonding experience like none other.

Not only has gaming solidified my relationship with my mother, it has also created a deep friendship between my husband and I. As a matter of fact, I would never have met him if I weren't a gamer. When people ask how we met, we always laugh. We met in Destard, a dungeon in the game Ultima Online. He killed me, but only because I let him (and I'm sticking to that story!). You see, there was a guild that I wanted to join in Destard doing a champion spawn. I was a necro, so I could speak to the living just as easily dead as alive, so after he killed me to protect his guild's spawn, I sauntered up to the Guild Master and asked to join her guild (another gaming mom by the way). That began a long on-line friendship that turned into some awkward real life dating (we lived nearly 300 miles from each other) and culminated in our very happy marriage. Our personal joke is that "the couple that pk's together, stays together".

I was never very interested in watching tv...it's just so boring! To me, playing computer games is like hoping into that movie and participating in the story. Although most of my in-game friends have come and gone, some of us have been playing together for years. Even those I have lost touch with have made a lasting impression on my life. When you spend 4 or 5 hours a day in voice chat with a group of people, its as if you are all in the same room together. The game fades into the background, personalities begin to shine and deep friendships are formed, based not on appearance, culture, color or social standing, but on the true person

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