Laura Genender is not imposing. Maybe 5 feet tall with long, brown hair and girl-next-door good looks, the Florida native appears to be your average college junior. She’s majoring in classics at Sweet Briar College and likes the egg rolls served in the dining hall.

She also likes carrots — not julienned or glazed, but the kind you get for killing monsters in EverQuest, her favorite video game. “Games intrinsically give a lot of reward,” she said. “They’ll throw out a lot of carrots.

“I like getting all my carrots. I think it makes me feel good when I’m playing the game and have something going off every five minutes telling you [that] you did good. I also like the fact that you’re interacting with other people.”

Genender interacts with people — lots of people — both as a game player and as community manager for MMORPG.com, a Web site that publishes articles and acts as a meeting place for video gamers.

“We make sure that they’re happy,” she said. “We make sure that they’re not calling each other bad names, which they do a lot. … Other than that, I’m basically den mother to everyone who comes on our site, which is about five thousands users a day.”

If you Google search Genender — and that’s pronounced with a hard “G” — you’ll find there’s more to the petite brunette than meets the eye. Underneath that regular-girl exterior is a ferocious video gamer who kills the occasional monster and whose articles appear on dozens of Web sites.

She’s even gotten the movie star treatment at industry conventions. “I actually met some people who worked on ‘Lineage’ when I was playing it, and they remembered me as a player,” she said.

“It was funny because the guy who basically ran ‘Lineage I’ in the United States … wanted to take a picture with me because I was a very famous player. He was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. Somebody get my camera. I want a picture with her.’ It was really fun.”

Genender has been playing video games for as long as she can remember. She played Word Munchers and Manhole on her parents’ hand-me-down computers. When she was 11 years old, she got Internet access and discovered the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, also known as MMORPG.

She was particularly active in the medieval fantasy game “Lineage: The Blood Pledge” and started writing for a fan Web site at 14. “It wasn’t a paid job,” she said. “I was just writing fun little articles and interviewing people in the game. It was fun for me.”

In her teens, Genender also co-edited two official game guides, which netted her a new computer and a “few thousand dollars,” and she contributed her writing skills to a third guide.

Now 20, her part-time job at MMORPG.com has perks like playing games before they’re released, meeting industry bigwigs, and a paycheck. “We interview the developers and also do reviews and previews,” she said. “The industry is still small, so you don’t have separate sites doing this yet.”

Last summer, Genender also worked for The Escapist, an online magazine that she describes as a “more intellectual gaming site.” Instead of writing reviews and interviews, she explored issues like, “What’s happening with women in the gaming world?”

“It’s changed over the years,” Genender said. “When I first started and played my first game, ‘Lineage,’ the joke was that I was the third girl. Out of a thousand people, that was probably pretty true.

“It’s actually really interesting to watch because people are always trying to figure out, ‘How do we get more women in the gaming world?’ As somebody who plays games and somebody who goes to a women’s college, I’m always thinking, ‘OK, what can I do? What breakthrough can I come [up with] that will earn me millions of dollars and get a perfect spot at Sony Online Entertainment?’ ”

Many girls and young women start playing video games to spend more time with a boyfriend, she said. The males are usually warriors and the females are clerics. Warriors need clerics, so it’s a pretty good arrangement.

“They keep telling their girlfriends, ‘Come here, we’ll spend time together,’ and that right there is a blinking light of good-good-good to any girlfriend because they get to spend time with their boyfriend,” she said. “It’s funny, because boyfriends are usually the beefy fighter classes, then their girlfriends will show up and be the healers.”

When asked which part she plays, Genender laughed. “My first character was a warrior,” she said. “I was always a warrior, and then [I] met a guy, so now I’m a cleric. I hate to admit it. I’m also partly the cleric because I don’t trust anyone else to be the cleric, because basically if you’re bad I’m going to die. So I just want to be good so no one will die.”

These days, school and her job with MMORPG.com allow Genender just a few hours a week to play video games, although she admits to keeping tabs on players in EverQuest. After graduating in 2008, she wants a full-time job in the industry and believes her classics degree will be an asset.

“It helps with your writing, and the most important thing to me is I eventually want to move to the game design world,” she said. “I want to make my own games. It’s a great field where I can draw from my knowledge of classics, where I can put things in games. I could take a particular battle scenario and move it into the game world and make it something players can play through.”

The writing emphasized in Sweet Briar’s liberal arts education has already opened doors for her in the video game industry. If she can’t start out as a designer, she plans to work her way up the ladder in community management, where her writing skills have proven to be an asset.

“I could have been a professional video game player,” she said. “They actually have those now; they’re in leagues. I could have done a lot of things with my hobby, but being able to write has given me a lot of opportunities that I wouldn’t have had before, and I think that it’s helped me a lot here.

“I’ve taken a lot of creative writing classes and that’s helped me a lot because all of a sudden, here’s a way that I can do something I love and get paid for it. And I think you can do that with any hobby. … I think that’s what I’ve taken out of Sweet Briar more than anything.”

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer