How I Turned My Wife Into a Gamer

A Little History

I’ve been a gaming fanatic since I was a little kid. If my mom can dig it out of the family archives, in a future post I’ll show a Christmas picture of me at 3 years old – one foot planted firmly on the hearth of our home in Virginia, one hand placed gently on a big box with huge block letters that read, “COMPUTER GAMING SYSTEM”.

The Atari 2600 was just hitting the scene (in a tough Christmas season for the video game industry) and Intellivision and ColecoVision were still on the horizon. But, my parents clearly saw something in me that made them pick up my beloved COMPUTER GAMING SYSTEM, despite the dearth of product offerings.

But, I digress. I’ll delve into my love affair with video games at a later date. I point it out here in an effort to set the stage and demonstrate the depth of my passion. A passion which is only rivaled by one other love – that which I have for my beautiful wife Jennifer and my four boys – Dalton, Hunter, Parker and Connor. So, imagine my dismay when I realized early on that Jennifer was not a fan of video games. I suppose I can’t really blame her. After all, she didn’t have a guide of my caliber to explain why they are so freakin’ cool.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

It wasn’t until our oldest son expressed an interest in trying out some online games that the tide began to turn. Deciding that my son was still too young to get into some of the more socially advanced MMOs (WoW, Everquest, EO, DAoC, AO, et.al.) but not wanting to curb his enthusiasm, I opted for an account with Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Disney, right? Safe enough. And off he went. Naturally, I created a character to see what I was getting my son into. We enjoyed several nights sitting down together talking through the basics: character creation, questing, skill progression, loot, grouping. He caught on quickly and before long was showing me where to go to complete quests. Since I couldn’t be around all the time while my son played, my wife picked up monitoring duties and it was that parental concern that finally opened the door for her.

“I think I’ll create a character so that I can see what this is all about,” she said. “I want to know what he’s [our son] talking about.”

“Sure,” I replied, “that sounds like a great idea.”

My wife was hooked. And it wasn’t more than a few weeks before she’d outgrown the simplistic gameplay of Pirates (although, the cooperative ship combat was pretty cool – post for another day).

Hook, Line and Sinker

She wanted something more challenging. Something more engaging. So Pirates was followed by a string of more mature online titles, including: Age of Conan, Everquest II and Vanguard. For Jennifer, each had its pros and cons, but nothing really hit the mark. Until…yeah…you guessed it.

I started my WoW account in November of 2004, but I’d been on hiatus for about a year, since November of 2007. When all this went down it was November of 2008.

Now, it’s October of 2009 and she is still going strong (with more 80s than I have). And it just dawned on me today how converted she is when she peeked her head over her monitor, smiled that beautiful smile, and said,

“Honey…I just found an add-on that you HAVE to check out! Now I can find all the rares in a zone through an overlay to my mini-map.”

12 months ago…if I had said that to her…she would have looked at me like I was speaking an obscure foreign language.

Life is good. My wife kicks ass.