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Hi, I'm Cathe and I'm the mom of a budding 4-year-old geekette and a 10-month-old son (who I have referred to in the past as my D&D sorcerer's familiar).
I am a gamer.
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A couple of months ago, I read a tweet in my Twitter feed that spoke of a gaming mom survey. I thought, "I'm a mom, I game, this could be fun." Upon looking at the Gaming Mom site, I had second thoughts about contacting the administrators, Jessica and Charlotte. The webpage was in Swedish and it didn't translate the first couple of times I visited. But, I finally got up the courage to contact Charlotte Hagstrom and Jessica Enevold about their survey.
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I quickly heard back from both Jessica and Charlotte and a few short weeks later I received my diaries in the mail. After a couple of hours on Google translator, I had a loose translation of what my instructions were.
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All I had to do was answer a few simple questions for every game I played over the course of a week: What do you play? When do you play it? How long to do you play it? What happens when you play? How do you feel when you play?white
My blog has my submitted diary entries. I found there was a trend to my gaming: I played short games during the day in five minute sessions to maintain my sanity. These games included Plants vs. Zombies and Wordfued (similar to Scrabble). In the evenings I played family games with my husband and daughter including Rock Band and Where's Waldo Memory. After the kids went to bed at night my time was spent doing things with my husband including Dungeons and Dragons via Skype, Warhammer miniature painting, Fiasco, and Alan Wake.white
Was this a typical week of gaming for me? Mostly, except my husband and I are now also starting an escalation league with a local Warhammer Fantasy club. The league meets on Sunday nights. We have convinced two sets of grandparents to alternate weekends joining us for dinner on Sunday nights as payment for 2 hours of babysitting so we can go get our geek and carnage on.white
My hope is that Jessica and Charlotte share their findings when their study is complete. It would be interesting to see where I, and other GeekMom readers, fall in the study. What are your gaming habits? Do you find that your game choices conform to the age range of your family?
