I got into it for world records. 3DMarks is a graphics benchmark that turned into a competiton. I got heavy into it and at one point attained 5th in the world. After a time, it got too expensive to keep up. Now hardware manufacturers sponsor people to break records. But I learned to keep ahead of the processor market that way. I do whatever anyone else does with their computer, but the thing that still pushes me to do it is gaming, and because I can. I buy what the man lets me, then I make it better. Some people use extreme overclocking for economic reasons. You can buy a less expensive processor, and clock it up to run like a more expensive processor, and you don't even have to super cool it do do this. Hope that explains it.
I hope you don't forget to wear your helmet and arm pads...
I remember AMD had actually too-high yields on the early Athlon core chips. So due to the market segmentation of their low-end and high-end chips, they had to mark chips that tested at (IIRC) 800MHz as 650MHz parts. Thus, overclocking a slow Athlon core chip was nothing, since it was likely that it was built to handle the speed anyway.
Contrast that with Intel's PIII 1.13GHz, which was overclocked by the OEM in the first place.
my son is a gamer too and is looking at buying a graphics card for the AMD 64 we just purchased. During Katrina coverage, I found a web cam in the CBD of NO and would watch the activities until my son figured out I was making him lag on his games. Web cam was the loser.