In movies and cartoons, MMO guild masters, or GMs, are often depicted as a 30-year-old man with a neckbeard living in his mother’s basement, living off Mountain Dew and Doritos. They’re generally goofy and fit the outdated stereotype of a nerd—yelling at their computer screens, surrounded by two or three monitors and thousands of dollars of gaming equipment. I’m none of those things, but for the last five years I’ve run a 100-plus member guild in Ultima Online, an MMO I’ve now been playing for nearly two decades.

I’m a 50-year-old grandmother of five and an award-winning journalist with a respectable job at a local newspaper. My days are spent writing stories about the town I live in, telling people what their local government is up to or who was arrested the night before. My PC is nine years old and runs Windows Vista in the corner of my living room. Nothing about me says “gamer,” but every night I sit at my computer, boot up the classic version of Ultima Online, and my second job begins.

(Hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)