The "Impossible" Romance

What it means to fall in love in an MMO

In the past, I’ve presented some stats on the romantic relationships that form online as well as some thoughts on how the social architectures of MMO environments may encourage relationship formation. In a recent survey, I was interested in exploring the formation of romantic relationships from the perspective of players who have physically dated someone they first met online. In particular, I wanted to get a better understanding of how the formation and development of these online relationships differed from ones these players have had that started face-to-face (F2F). Their narratives help illustrate that these online romances have their own set of constraints and affordances and are not simply inferior or superficial versions of F2F relationships.

I received 115 responses to an open-ended survey targeting players who have physically dated someone they first met in an MMO. The majority of these relationships were still ongoing when the survey was conducted (67%). Of course, there is likely a sampling bias here of players who have had positive and ongoing relationships in the sample. On the other hand, I was less interested here in getting representative stats, and more interested in a qualitative understanding of the issue. Nevertheless, it is important to point out this sampling bias so readers are aware that even though a lot of important information can be gleaned from the narratives that follow, these narratives are probably more positive in tone due to an under-sampling of failed relationships.

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Brief Sketches of Love

First Contact

Let’s start by going over some representative sketches of the formative period of these online romances. These sketches will help ground us before we talk more conceptually about these relationships. Most players describe fairly commonplace and low-key situations for how they first met their romantic partner.

In many circumstances, both players belonged to the same guild and the guild played an important role in the initial meeting and providing sustained contact.

Incubation Period

An incubation period then typically follows where the casual relationship evolves very gradually over a period of typically 3 months to 12 months.

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Moment of Truth

These developing emotions then come to a point where the players decide to express their romantic feelings to each other. Most players had fairly detailed descriptions of this part of their relationship.

Cascade of Communication Mediums

This early period in the relationship is often supported by increasingly synchronous and intimate forms of communication (i.e., phone or webcam). The relationship starts to progress via other communication mediums. In other words, most players don’t jump from avatar to F2F directly as assumed by some media reports that try to paint these relationships as largely based on fantasy.

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Meeting F2F

These romantic partners were almost always separated by great geographic distances. In fact, in all the 115 responses, no pair of romantic partners were living in the same state. In many cases, romantic partners lived in different countries. Meeting F2F was thus a multi-layered problem for many of these couples. It was likely to have been a significant emotional, time, and financial investment.

Many players expressed great anxiety and fear as they step foot off the plane or train and were about to see their romantic partner F2F for the first time. The word “intense” was used very often in this section of the open-ended responses.

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Ever After

There were many happy endings from the responses. Many of the couples had relocated to be together geographically, and many indicated plans for marriage or children.

But there were also stories that didn’t have happy endings. Among the relationships that ended soon after the F2F meeting, some cited the geographic distance as the primary problem, while others cited problems with “chemistry”, and a few described gradual conflicts or personality differences similar to ones that would terminate F2F relationships.

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Low Pressure Environment

Let’s now talk more conceptually about these romantic relationships and the unique constraints and affordances of MMO environments. While it’s easy to compare this aspect of MMOs to a dating website or a romance chat room, these analogies are in fact inaccurate and frame these relationships incorrectly. First of all, none of the respondents described themselves as deliberately looking for love when they met their romantic partner. In fact, they often described the opposite.

The more apt analogy is probably the gym or the office - places where romance is not the primary goal for social interaction. This is an important distinction to make because people interact very differently when under and not under the pretense of a date. In other words, the formative and incubation period of these online relationships typically occur without this additional emotional pressure.

More importantly, the game environment provides a variety of collaborative tasks that allow players to get to know each other. In fact, players are forced to communicate with each other.

As other players point out, working together through crises reveals much more about another person than going to the movies with them. Watching how someone interacts with others in different social settings (under different amounts of stress) and how they work through problems can be very character-revealing.

In other words, many of these players got to know each other without the intent of trying to impress, date, or get in bed with each other.

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Anonymity and Honesty

The notion of anonymity intersects with relationship formation in many different ways. Let’s walk through several of these. We’ve seen that most of these players were not specifically looking for romance online when they met their romantic partner. We’ve also noted that they typically live great distances from each other. Because players assume that they are talking to someone they will never meet F2F, the initial formative period can encourage honesty. After all, there is little incentive to lie to someone you don’t know and assume will never meet.

Others commented that it’s easier to get to know someone precisely because of the anonymity - people are more open with each other.

Honesty was in fact an issue that many respondents brought up themselves. These players typically suggested extreme caution about taking what people say at face value. Nevertheless, when they then described their own experiences, most players noted the complete honesty that they and their partners exhibited prior to meeting F2F.

Another potential buffer to deception is the presence of other communication modalities that we mentioned earlier. It’s much harder to lie to someone about physical appearances when they can see you on a webcam.

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Masks and Superficiality

Superficiality was another issue that many players dealt with in their narratives. One argument was that players necessarily embellish themselves online and thus online identities are typically superficial.

Others countered that people are superficial in real life as well, and in fact, many common tools of self-embellishment in the physical world do not exist in virtual worlds.

Another line of counter-argument noted that physical appearances are deemphasized online, leading to a stronger concentration on internal qualities - such as personality and intelligence. These players question why emphasis on physical appearances in F2F relationships is considered normal while emphasis on internal qualities in online relationships is instead considered superficial.

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Creating Possibilities: Part One

One statistic was the most surprising from the narratives. Of all the respondents who were still in the relationship that began in an MMO, 60% of them indicated that they didn’t think the relationship would have happened in a F2F context, even had they met. Another 18% were not sure. Only 22% were somewhat certain that the relationship would have happened F2F. Thus, one very intriguing theme that emerged in the narratives was the notion that these virtual worlds had made it possible for otherwise “impossible relationships” to happen. By this, some referred back to the geographic separation, but many respondents suggested that their relationship would not have occurred F2F even if they had met each other. Respondents described two kinds of “impossible relationships” that were made possible by virtual worlds.

The first kind of “impossible relationship” revolves around shyness. As I read through the narratives, it surprised me how often respondents described, without any prompting from the questions, either their own shyness or their partner’s shyness.

About 25% of all respondents mentioned shyness somewhere in their narratives, either in describing themselves, their romantic partners, or both. Of course, it’s not clear whether this percentage is higher or lower than online gamers, video gamers, or the population in general. On the other hand, it makes it easy to understand why a non-trivial number of respondents felt that their shyness or their partner’s shyness would have prevented the relationship from ever happening even had they met in real life.

These narratives show that virtual worlds can enable the formation of relationships that would otherwise have been considered impossible F2F, even though the two people are actually highly compatible and can develop a significant romantic bond. The confidence that people can acquire online due to anonymity, something that has been critiqued as leading to superficiality, can in fact have very real and positive consequences for some people.

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Creating Possibilities: Part Two

There was another kind of “impossible relationship” that was made possible in virtual worlds. As we saw earlier, many respondents felt that the virtual environment deemphasized external qualities (such as physical appearance) and made it easier to get a sense of another person’s internal qualities (such as personality and intelligence).

Some respondents described this as getting to know someone from the inside out - a reversal of how things typically progress in relationships that start F2F.

In fact, this process of “inside-out” made possible many relationships that would never have started if they began “outside-in”. Many respondents suggested that they would never have given their partners the chance to learn about the inner qualities that they now love them for had they met F2F.

It is ironic that the norm of F2F relationships makes it easy for some to argue that virtual relationships are necessarily superficial. But as these narratives show, the absence of physical cues can in fact make relationships less focused on superficial qualities between people who are in fact highly compatible.

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Ending Thoughts - Stronger Foundations

Not only do virtual worlds make “impossible relationships” possible, but many respondents argued that the process itself provides much stronger foundations for a long-term relationship than is typical in F2F relationships.

The theme that the low-pressure game environment allowed them to become good friends before romantic partners was described by many other respondents. These players had gotten to know each other well, worked together, and gone through crises together before love happened.

It’s easy to argue that MMO relationships are somehow superficial because they are “missing” things that people have in F2F relationships, but I think that argument fails to understand that sometimes less can be more, and that there can be something superficial about the emphasis on physical attributes in F2F relationships. The notion that the MMO can render the “impossible relationship” possible is intriguing indeed. But ultimately, the most interesting thing that we’ve learned from the narratives is this. The MMO relationship isn’t something you can look for. It’s something that happens to you.

Love is in the Air

We hear a lot of anecdotes of players who met their romantic partners in an MMO, but how prevalent is this? In a recent survey, I asked players about their experiences in a variety of courtship stages to get a general idea about the prevalence of romance in MMOs.

Many players have at one point or another flirted with another player. About 80% of female players and 60% of male players have flirted with another player. There were almost no age differences except for the lower rate of flirtation among male players in the 12-17 range.

About 50% of female players and 22% of male players have developed romantic feelings for another player. These percentages largely did not change with age. Players from 12 - 40 and above were just as likely to develop romantic feelings for another player.

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About 40% of female players and 15% of male players have told another player about their romantic feelings for them. Again, we see very few age differences.

And finally, about 29% of female players and 8% of male players have physically dated someone who they first met in an MMO. Again, it’s hard to discern a strong age difference. Both these percentages feel very high, and the only other data point I have comes from the 2000 survey on EQ players, where the corresponding numbers were 15% and 3% (so almost double of what was found 6 years ago). Now, the other thing may just be that the survey respondents are skewed towards more involved players who are thus more likely to report relationships. So I tried to see if the likelihood of physically dating someone increased dramatically with hours played per week. The correlation came out at r = .07, not strong enough to have a dramatic effect. In other words, even if heavy time involvement was a general sampling bias among the respondents, it has only a mild impact on these particular percentages.

Question for readers: Do you know anyone who is dating (or has dated) someone they first met in an MMO? If you’ve played MMOs for a few years, have you noticed an increase in these kinds of relationships?

Note: If you've physically dated someone who you first met in an MMO, please consider taking some time to tell me about your experience in this survey.

Playing with Someone (Part 2)

In the last issue, we saw that many players play with someone they know in RL on a regular basis - whether this is a family member, a romantic partner, or a friend. There’s a related issue that we couldn’t tease out from that last dataset. Specifically, it would help to know how many MMO players are in romantic relationships to begin with, and of those, how many are playing with their romantic partners. In a sense, this is the inverse of the question that was addressed in the previous article. It also helps us make more sense of the percentage of players who play with a romantic partner. For example, we know that about 25% of players play with a romantic partner. But of all the players who have romantic partners to begin with, do a low or high percentage of them actually play with their romantic partner? And we could ask the same question for parents who play with their children. For both these questions, we need to know the base rates for players who have romantic partners or children.

These are the questions that a newer dataset has addressed. About 80% of female players and 60% of male players are in a romantic relationship. On a tangential note, this gives rise to an interesting “singles” imbalance. If we assume an 85:15 gender ratio and the noted singles rate, then for every single woman in an MMO, there are 10 single men.

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Respondents were then asked whether their romantic partner plays the MMO they do, and if so, whether they usually play together or separately. Of the female players who are in a romantic relationship, about 50% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. Of the male players who are in a romantic relationship, only about 20% of their romantic partners play with them on a regular basis. The most striking difference is that the romantic partners of female players are about three times more likely to play the MMO they play than the romantic partners of male players.

A large part of what we’re seeing here is probably the “introduction” effect. Because a much higher percentage of female players are introduced to the game via their romantic partner, this increases the likelihood that a female player is playing with their romantic partner. The overall story is that not only are female players more likely to be in romantic relationships to begin with, but they’re very likely to be playing with their romantic partner.

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The differences for players who play with their children was less pronounced. About 28% of female players and 20% of male players have at least one child. Of the male players who have children, about 11% play the game with them. For the female players, this was about 18%. It’s interesting to note that the children of female players are more likely to be playing an MMO. I don’t have a good explanation for this though. Any thoughts?

Playing With Someone

The media oftentimes portrays video gamers as being anti-social loners, but past data has shown that many MMOs players were playing with their family or with their romantic partner. Thus, it was clear that a non-trivial percentage of MMO gamers were playing with someone they knew in real life - that gaming wasn’t always anti-social and wasn’t always simply virtual. And it was also clear that friends, romantic partners, and family members were the 3 main categories of people that gamers were most likely to play with. But because I had never asked all 3 at once, it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was. To that end, I finally got around to asking all 3 at once and that allowed me figure out the percentage of players who are and are not playing with someone they know in RL. All the following data relates to whether a player plays (on a regular basis) with someone they know in RL.

First, let’s start with the MMO players who play with their romantic partners. Overall, 25% of players are playing with a romantic partner. As we’ve seen before, and particularly because of the gender ratio in MMOs, female players are much more likely to be playing with a romantic partner than male players.

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I then asked about family members. For the purpose of this particular survey, respondents were instructed that husbands/wives counted as romantic partners and not family members. Overall, 19% of MMO players play with a family member (again, after excluding romantic partners). There were only marginal gender differences. As for age differences, it seemed that the 23-28 group (post-college, early career) were a little less likely to be playing with a family member.

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To get a better sense of who these family members actually were, respondents were asked to name the relationship of family members they play with. Overall, the most often listed family member were brothers, followed by sons.

There was a clear gender split though. Male players were more likely to be playing with their brothers, while female players were more likely to be playing with their sons. Woven into this is also of course an age difference. It is the younger, male players who are more likely to be playing with brothers, and the older, female players who are more likely to be playing with their sons.

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And finally, respondents were asked whether they play with any friends that they know in RL. Overall, 70% of respondents replied yes. Gender differences seemed to diminish with age

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So now this data lets us get to the main question we had - overall, how many MMO players are playing with people they know in RL and how many are not? About 80% of players are playing with someone they know in RL on a regular basis. In other words, only about 20% of MMO players are playing a game and not playing with someone they know in real life on a regular basis. The following table shows the gender distribution. For example, the “Two” category means playing with people from 2 of the 3 categories (friend / family member / romantic partner).

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Also, playing with people that are known from RL tends to be an enjoyable experiences for most of these gamers. The only gender difference appears to be among those who play with a romantic partner. Female players report more positive experiences with their romantic partners than male players report. Overall, these findings do show that the online game space can be seen as a place where existing RL ties are being strengthened.

So even though some critics of online games focus on how ephemeral online relationships are, it seems that most players play with someone they know from RL on a regular basis. It also helps us see these online games as places where existing RL ties are being strengthened rather than simply places where only virtual relationships are forged.

Are MMORPG Relationships Meaningless?

That was the question posed to MMORPG players, and they were asked to use their own personal experiences in explaining their answer. The responses presented below help highlight the different ways that players approach the question as well as point out what the key issues are.

The respondents who believed that the relationships in MMORPGs were superficial mainly used arguments focusing on the facelessness of the communication:

One player on the other side of the spectrum articulated that the facelessness of the communication is in fact a good thing:

And as another player points us, are we kidding ourselves if we say that people don’t pretend to be things they aren’t in real life or that there are only good people in the real world?

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Of course, others in the same side of the discussion would also point out that at the other side of the communication is another person in flesh and blood, and that you are interacting with a real person after all regardless of the apparent facelessness:

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Other respondents took this point one step further, arguing that a relationship is a relationship and that that is the core of the issue:

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But as other players highlight, it’s more about how the individual player approaches the game that determines whether they will form meaningful relationships in the game:

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And ultimately, it’s really what you want it to be, which is what real life relationships turn out be about as well:

Inside Out

Note: This essay was originally written for the MMOG magazine which has since gone out of business. This essay is a more fleshed-out rewrite of the "Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves" presentation.

We are on the cusp of a new generation where parents telling their children about the circumstances of how they met will not revolve around college parties, chance encounters at a coffee shop or business conferences. Instead, they will tell their children how they met each other while battling gnolls in subterranean caverns or slaying the undead in forgotten crypts while pretending to be warriors or clerics. Of course, this could have happened in the MUD days, but it is the success of MMORPGs that have suddenly increased the number of romantic relationships that began this way. Survey data collected from players of EverQuest (EQ), Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), and Ultima Online (UO) show that romantic relationships that began in MMORPGs are not particularly rare.

This is especially true given that 2 out of 3 MMORPG players are already romantically involved (dating, engaged or married). In other words, only 33% of players are available for a romantic relationship to begin with.

But the prevalence of very close friendships, as opposed to romantic relationships, that develop online is also very striking. Most MMORPG players have become good friends with someone they met in the game.

And many of these players feel that they would consider their online friends to be comparable or better than their real life friends.

About 3-4 years back, the prevailing talk-show wisdom was that people who fell in love online were socially maladjusted and had deep-seated psychological issues. This view still lingers, but the prevalence of both platonic and romantic relationships that occur online force us to ask whether it is not something about these environments and the mechanics of the communication, rather than something about the people, that change the way that relationships form. Could it be that people become friends and fall in love in a different way in an MMORPG?

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Sharing Secrets

Part of what we mean when we say so-and-so is a good friend is that we know a lot about them, and not just that we have a good sense of their personality and how they might react in a certain situation, but that we know revealing personal details about them that very few other people know. The process of mutual self-disclosure in a normal real-life relationship is like a dance, with a lot of expected reciprocations and rules. If you tell someone about your childhood traumas on the first date, they may not return your phone calls for a second date. If someone shares an intimate secret, and you don’t reciprocate, they might feel slighted. But ultimately, it is this dance of give-and-take that builds the foundation for a close relationship – whether platonic or romantic.

While it may come to a surprise to some people, there is a good deal of evidence that people are more revealing about themselves and more forth-coming with intimate details when communicating over a textual, computer-mediated channel. This was first observed by clinical psychologists who began using computers where new patients would type in their answers to some screening questions. What these clinical psychologists found was that patients using the computers were much more forthcoming than new patients who were asked those same questions face-to-face. In other words, even though the patients knew that the clinician would read or hear their answers, they would be more revealing when answering in a typed channel as opposed to in a face-to-face situation.

One reason why this occurs is that when you’re typing to a computer, you don’t worry about how you look, what you’re wearing, or whether you’re smiling at the right time. A lot of this self-consciousness is irrelevant when typing on a computer, and all this energy is instead channeled to the message itself, which typically becomes more detailed. In the case of an MMORPG, the ability to be in the safety and comfort of your own home while typing relieves some of the tension of saying something intimate. Also, oftentimes in a face-to-face conversation, we censor ourselves because of what we perceive to be a subtle frown or a slightly raised eyebrow on the other person’s face. We don’t want to elaborate on something if the other person isn’t interested. Many of these gestures and cues are absent online, and this allows us to finish our original thought more often – the unchanged, uncensored version of what we wanted to say. And we also have anecdotal and survey data that supports that a high level of personal self-disclosure occurs in MMORPGs.

Being able to talk to someone about a problem that is bothering you can often bring some relief. The problem is that this is not always possible in the real world. The anonymity of online environments makes it easier for a lot of people to share their personal issues, because oftentimes the very people they might turn to in real life are part of the issue itself. Another reason why the anonymity helps is because it removes any fear of repercussions. A teenager who is unsure of his sexuality is highly unlikely to share this information with his friends and family. A husband who is experiencing difficulty with his spouse might be able to talk about the problem with an online friend without fear of aggravating the problem in real life.

This dance of sharing secrets and intimate details occurs very slowly in real life because usually we only feel comfortable saying these things behind closed doors or when we are alone with the other person, and only after knowing them for a long time. In the MMORPG world, this dance happens much sooner because there are far fewer consequences and the environment facilitates this kind of intimate disclosure. In other words, this foundation of a good relationship is far easier to reach in an MMORPG than in real life because of the textual communication and the anonymity.

Of course, this is not to say that everyone who plays an MMOPRG will share their personal lives with their fellow players, but in general, people are more likely to disclose personal information online than in real life for the reasons mentioned. But apart from being more likely to share intimate issues and problems with other players, there are other reasons why relationships in MMORPGs begin and develop differently.

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Crises, Trust and Bonding

Every MMORPG player can recall a high-adrenaline battle or surviving a fight with a handful of HP left. If an MMORPG can guarantee anything, it can guarantee that you’ll be faced with many sudden high-stress situations where the group or your hunting partner needs to make very decisive actions. Maybe the cleric is low on mana when the room suddenly respawns, or you fall off a bridge in a dungeon and end up in the corner of a room full of purple-cons. These kinds of situations force the group to work together or perish. They force players to depend on each other, to trust each other and to work together as a team. These experiences are often very salient trust-building exercises for all the players involved.

Because most MMORPG players spend a significant portion of their free time playing the game, they become very emotionally invested to their characters and what happens to them. Most players are very serious as to what happens to their character, and this heightens the intensity of these high-stress situations. This pairing of emotional investment and frequency of trust-building situations in MMORPGs facilitate the “jump-starting” of solid bonds between players.

Moreover, stressful situations in MMORPGs seem to bring out the best and worst of individuals. Most MMORPG players can recall experiences where another player displayed a remarkable degree of honor, altruism, self-sacrifice, betrayal or cowardice. This is not to say that players who act honorably in MMORPGs are honorable in real life, but because most players assume that other players are as emotionally invested as they are, they tend to feel that these honorable or cowardly actions give a glimpse into how this other person might be in the real world. In a sense, all of us would like to put our friends into simulated crises to see whether they would stand by us in a time of need. We would all like to know which of our friends we can count on. Unfortunately, we usually don’t find out the answer until that time of need arrives. Friendships in MMORPGs go through this process almost in reverse. Instead of making friends and then slowly finding out whether they can really be trusted, MMORPG players are making friends with people who have demonstrated that they can be trusted because of their actions under spontaneous crises that required difficult decisions.

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Compatibility

One reason why many people are uncomfortable with meeting people online is because, at first glance, it feels like finding a needle in a farmhouse of haystacks. The chances of finding someone you could get along with just feel very remote. They then project this attitude and conclude that the likelihood of other people finding compatible romantic partners is also very low. But the opposite might be true in MMORPGs. MMORPG players who are employed tend to work in the IT industry (36% of employed EQ players, N=1099), and most MMORPG players have previous experience with table-top RPGs (68% of EQ, DAOC, UO, AC, and AO combined, N=3415). IT workers are usually very analytical and rational people; RPG players are usually imaginative and idiosyncratic. Both tend to be non-conformist.

In other words, people who play MMORPGs are probably similar in more ways than not. When you think about, an MMORPG is a highly specific kind of entertainment. People who like first-person shooters are probably not the kind of people who like MMORPGs. By the same token, people who play MMORPGs and enjoy the slow level advancement, character development, and simulated battles while immersed within a fantastical medieval world probably share other attitudes and interests. The MMORPG effectively attracts people with similar interests and attitudes while at the same time filtering out the people who do not share these interests. What you end up with in an MMORPG is a pre-filtered group of people. This is why compatibility is more likely to occur.

Meeting someone compatible in an MMORPG would only be a shot in the dark if you believed that MMORPG players are a representative sample of the general population, which is definitely not the case. Thus, another reason why good relationships are so common in MMORPGs is because players tend to be meeting people who are more compatible with them than a random person they meet in real life. It’s like meeting someone on a message board about the French culinary arts during the late Renaissance. The interest is so focused and specific that other shared attitudes are highly likely.

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Idealization

Even though an MMORPG already offers a higher chance of compatibility among players, there’s something else that artificially boosts this sense of compatibility. The “Law of Attraction” in psychology states that people tend to like those with shared attitudes, values or beliefs. This is true as long as there aren’t a lot of things they disagree on. The internet is very good at hiding differences because a lot of physical cues we use to judge others are missing – clothing, hair style, speech inflection, accent, age, appearance, expressions and gestures among others. A lot of times, we don’t even consider approaching someone because of their hair style or the clothes they are wearing. But we don’t see those things when we chat with someone online. And because those differences are hidden away, we focus on all the things we do agree on and the sense of compatibility is enhanced even though this would not have been the case if this meeting occurred in the real world. In other words, many relationships that would never have even begun in the real world have a far better chance of developing online. To some people, this is a good thing.

This heightened sense of compatibility is especially important in the development of romantic relationships. Romance usually begins with an idealization of the other person where they gain god-like features and abilities, where they become flawless and perfect in every way. The textual communication in MMORPGs almost encourages people to fill in the blanks. It lets people idealize as much as possible while hiding the flaws as much as possible. These idealizations are reinforced by the game metaphors themselves – knights in shining armor, clerics with glowing aura. Thus, these metaphors also encourage projecting a superhuman idealization upon another player apart from the underlying inflated sense of compatibility. As one player puts it:

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A Relationship in Reverse

One way to think about MMORPG relationships is that they happen almost in reverse of how a RL relationship would occur. All the things that typically take a long time to know about someone in a RL relationship usually happen very early and very quickly. For example, it takes a long time before two people in real life, whether they are dating or just friends, to share secrets with each other. We know that the opposite is true online. We know that many MMORPG players have shared secrets with their online friends that they haven’t told their real life friends.

The MMORPGs also allow people to see how someone would react under a sudden high-stress situation, and how they treat you in a situation where you need their help or support. These situations are far rarer in real life. The environment also allows you to see how they interact with other people in a multitude of scenarios. A lot of times when we meet someone in real life or when we date them, we don’t really get to see their other sides – especially how they treat other people.

In real life, we judge a person first by their physical appearance and then we get to know their character and values. In an MMORPG, the reverse is true. You get a sense of their values and character from the situations in the game. You hang out with them because you share a lot of common values or you like their personality. And then finally, you may meet them in real life where you judge their physical appearance. As this player describes, her relationship happened “inside-out”:

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Conclusion

Part of the concern over online relationships is that they are superficial because the premise of the game is to pretend to be someone else. How could you possibly know someone well in such an environment? The thing to remember is that people “pretend” all the time in real life. People wear “masks” in real life and “putting on a front” is something happens in the real world as well.

In fact, a significant portion of MMORPG players feel that they can be more of who they really are in the virtual world.

Other players feel that online relationships can be substantial because people are actually less superficial online. The removal of physical cues such as age, appearance, race and social class forces players to interact with each other with far fewer prejudices and stereotypes than they would in real life.

And as one player notes, the irony is that online relationships can turn out to be less superficial than real life relationships.

Finally, while many people are frightened by the prospect of encountering individuals with bad intentions in an online environment, those same individuals oftentimes underestimate the number of those same people they are encountering in real life. After all, the “bad” people you meet in virtual worlds live in the real world. Prudence and cautiousness are things that people need to keep in mind in both the virtual and the real world. And considering the restricted range of things that other people can do to each other online when compared with the real world, it seems surprising how worried some people get over online relationships.

Some people are hesitant to use the words “romantic relationship” or “good friendship” to describe these online relationships, and by and large, they are correct in that these relationships begin and develop in an entirely different way than face-to-face relationships. But just because they happen differently, sometimes in reverse, doesn’t mean they aren’t just as real and valuable as face-to-face relationships. If what we mean by friendship or love is really getting to know someone well, then perhaps environments like an MMORPG do have something very important to offer.

My Best Friend

It surprises many non-gamers as well as some gamers that players can make good friends online. After all, how do you really get to know someone when everyone is pretending to be someone else? Part of the answer is that the pretense of pretending to be someone else allows many individuals to shed the guises they wear in real life, and become more of who they really are. A fuller exploration of the reasons why strong bonds form in MMORPGs can be found in this presentation. (http://www.nickyee.com/hub/relationships/intro.html)

When players were asked whether the person they would consider to be their best friend was someone they met online in the game, 7% of male players and 19% of female players indicated that this was the case. The age differences were quite striking. While male players across all ages tended to show a stable 5-9% range, female players revealed a striking age difference. The prevalence of this phenomenon is highest among 12-17 year old female players and then declines until it hits a trough among 29-35 year old female players and then rises slightly among female players over 35 years of age.