That's a really interesting story! I think it's a much more common kind of story for women, which is one of the reasons they always have a bit of an outsider status in geek-dom, that it's later in life, or when a specific opportunity presents itself that women become familiar with computer etc!

One of the reason I quite enjoy these gamer conferences is because you get to see the whole ecology of these systems in one place. Even the really hardcore women talk about things like feeling anxiety when they play an online game, that people will see that they aren't good enough, or even just that they won't know the etiquette of it.

Thanks for the encouragement ;) At the moment I'm calling this character The Hacker, but I might have to come up with some less generic name in a bit. It's very Literary Criticism or maybe Cultural Studies style, rather than Sociology which is more my training and a bit less playful, so I'm not quite sure where to go with it...