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Love In The Time of Warcraft
Via Edge Online, an article at the Wall Street Journal talking about the process of finding love in an MMOG. From the article: "Nick Yee, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who studies online games, found in a survey earlier this year that 29% of women players and 8% of men said they had gone on to date someone they met in a game. He says the games are filled with scenarios that shed light on players' personalities. A risky raid on a dungeon, for example, can reveal whether someone is a team player. 'These are trust-building exercises,' he says. Players 'are constantly having to make decisions like, Do I run out and save myself or help the others survive?' Situations that reveal so much about someone's character are less common in the real world, he thinks. Yankee Group, a Boston technology-research firm, estimates that MMOGs, which can be played simultaneously by thousands of people using the Internet, are played by 25 million to 30 million people world-wide."
for those times when that bouncy night elf female isn't who you thought she would be !
Someone saying something positive about games? Someone is suggesting that healthy relationships can arise from gaming?
... but kids today go on the internet and I've seen the things on there--it's the devil!
We need to stop that. Those stereotypes and social stigmas are time honored and sacred traditions. If we lose those, the terrorists have already won.
I need to be able to say, "Well, at least I didn't meet my wife online!" in order to point out how obviously better I am than everyone else. I got drunk at a bar and knocked my wife up and that's how I became happily married. My son and his son are going to do the same thing if I have anything to say about it!
This is change & I don't like it. We need to stay as static as possible and prevent this from becoming the norm. Sure kids in my day listened to rock music and went to dances despite what our parents said
Someone get me Jack Thompson, we need a man of religious convictions that will secure the sanctity of this nation!
My work here is dung.
Epic Mounts, Part 1 and Part 2.
Now if only in-game avatars matched their users. I'm sick of going on dates with 40 year old men when I thought I was going to meet a 20-something "long cool woman in a black dress" (to quote the Hollies).
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
I was citing Nick's work on social issues in gaming years ago, just when is he going to finish his Ph.D.?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Well, my current data shows 12 - 13 million in the MMOGs I track, and there's probably that many again playing many Asian MMOGs that I don't track, so 24 - 26 million worldwide is in good agreement with their estimate of 25-30 million.
Bruce
Good one.
I can see it now..... Friend: So how did you meet? Guy: We were in this party in WOW. It was love at first healing wave! She completes my barabarian so well with shaman side. I was totally under her spell. Girl: He was tall, dark, and handsome... and he could plow through those night-elves like no one else! Friend: So where was the wedding? Guy: Oh, we invited several hundred of our closest friends to the Druid village. Girl: We wanted an all-inclusive wedding, so everyone could attend. I'm trying not to think about the honeymoon........
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
Hey Baby my Stamina isn't the only thing that gets bigger while in bear form.
The statistical difference between the percentage of males vs. females who have dated based on an in-game connection is of some interest.
It's much higher for women. The question is, why? A reasonable conclusion could be that more females participate in MMORPGs for social reasons than for pure gameplay. One question worth investigating is the ages of male vs. female players. Might it be that female players are generally older?
As one leaves school, one also leaves behind social opportunities for dating--most people find that it is a lot easier finding dates in college than at work.
Enjoy!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"As part of your eHarmony compatibility profile you will experience dungeon raids and other exercises designed to determine your true compatibility.'
"When Johhny cast the spell of Eternal Light and destroyed the dark lord I just knew he was the man for me!"
eHarmony MMPORG
I was surprised to learn that women flirt SO much more than men do online. And on the depressing side, I haven't really seen it, which either means they aren't flirting that much with ME, or they are and I'm too much of a clueless male to see it.
Then again, maybe the difference is explained by gender-biased definitions of "flirting". Maybe most guys think saying, "Wow, you've got a nice rack!" doesn't count as flirting, whereas maybe women think simply typing a winky-smiley-face counts as flirting.
Bruce
My girlfriend (whom I met first in real life) and I both play WoW. I play a holy/discipline priest, which I suppose says that I'm nurturing, focused, a team player, and can't fight for crap. My girlfriend is a fire mage, which says to me that she's a potentially unstable pyromaniac. Uh... uh-oh, better hide the matches.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
> Nick Yee, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University who studies
> online games
And you thought `media studies` students were a waste of skin...
Keep in mind, you only ever hear about the people who fail. Some of us can and have faked it for a very long time.
So to answer your questions... yes we can fool you, yes the 'victims' probably would mind, and yes pulling off such a feat requires a great deal of rational thought in order to succeed. Any more questions?
PS: Gonna have to go AC for this one... yeah, we live amongst you. Beware the cyber, uh, sex terrorists?
If more and more of their life experiences are drawn from a fantasy world, what set of morals and ethics will they be learning from?
As opposed to? I can experience more "life" from my house than most people experience sitting wasted in a bar all evening. Working with friends and teammates to take down a giant boss is more of an accomplishment to me than hiring a tour guide to take me to the top of Mt Everest.
The higher percentage of women is due to their lower total numbers, and is not attributable to either sex lying about it.
This means either...
Only 8% of the men are smart enough to know how to score a date through WoW so far, and are doing it multiple times...
21% of the women are dating each other!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All the oh-so-witty mangina and crying-game references aside, this is a very interesting article. And I think not that far off the mark.
My girlfriend and I (who met 7 years ago online but not in a MMOG) are heading down to the US next week to party with the folks we played EQ1 and now play WoW with. This is the third year for us, and the 4th year for the guild as a whole to hold an annual picnic. And ya know what? Its a blast, we don't just sit around re-hashing raids, or talking gear or skills, but actually find that we have this odd bond of trust and openess (likely due to spending countless hours together in somewhat stressful situations). We were really nervous the first year, but look forward to it even more each year. We are expecting from 40-50 people to show up this year, from all over the US (and us two from Canada). Quite a few of us are couples, yes, some are guys who play girls online (oddly most of them single), and there is not a large number of single women in our guild (but there is a few).
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I could see WoW as a good way to measure someone's personality. There's the trust building, as was mentioned above, but there's more than that. Aggro management, the key to surviving most of the dungeons and even raids, depends heavily on the group working together, with individual members adhering to others' advice. And between loot distribution, and the dependency on the group, there's bound to come a point of conflict where the character of the players (no pun intended) gets put to the test. Do the members ignore the issue and fail to function as a team? Does it erupt into full blown melee where someone gets pissed and leaves the group? Or do the members have enough ego to resolve it without resorting to immature outlashes? While certainly not a replacement for dating, the group styles of gaming give you the chance to see into other's personalities, one of the main reasons people date before commiting to serious relationships. Thus, I could see it as a sort of ice breaker, enough to convince to strangers that they like interacting with this other person, and that they should continue to develop what potential is there offline; at the same time helping them avoid some of the more "under-developed" personalities out there.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
In other words, you're ridicously fit and extremly bad at playing computer games?
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Ah yes, WoW. Where the men are men, and so are half of the women.
I will not be so worried about the "security of the sanctity of this nation". But it seems to be some truth in the fact that some people shows some parts of their personality playing online.
I've been playing online since '96 or '97, a popular local MUD named "The Crow". And now I play RO, and in these long time I've discovered that it's not really easy to find good and thrustworty people. Some are easy to tell only by just listening (well reading) how do they speak. Some others are fownd by watching them play. And even then, you will find that there are many kind of people.
I think that finding a serious party it's not easy. And speaking about serious players I don't mean people that could become proplayers or that sit to play six hour day. I mean people that even when they play one or two time week, for one or two hours, they should be serious enought to underestand thery role in the game. Even when we should be doing stupid thing from time to time, good people is notorious because they know how to be polite and responsible, while knowing that it is just a game.
I have one basic rule playing online: "Don't mix the game and the real world". But from time to time you could not avoid speaking of your real self and on a few chanses you end up meeting some people. I had found a few friends playing online games, and had found many that should be taken care for.
I assumed it was more basic than that. While an MMORPG is a "target rich environment" for women looking for a certain type of guy, the basics of human mating are that guys are pretty much always up for a date, while women are far choosier about potential mates. The results of an online signaling contest would be more important to a women than a man in determining who to accept for further encounter isn't much of a surprise.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I play a Night Elf female. The free gold rules.
There is a married woman in my guild who is cheating on her husband with someone she met in my WoW guild. I feel really bad for the guy. It's not all roses.
- Vincit qui patitur.
MMORPG = Multiple Men Online Role Playing Girls
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
74 comments and not a single Cthulhu joke :(
(And love in WoW? Not from anyone on the wrong end of inedible heart candy spam, I'll wager.)
If more and more of their life experiences are drawn from a fantasy world, what set of morals and ethics will they be learning from?
As apposed to the fantasy world of the bible which is supposedly the foundation of the western moral code?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
While his work is very interesting, it's important to understand something about Nick Yee's methodology. He bases his results on surveys. He advertises the surveys via his site and others and by email, and whoever wishes to can drop by to complete them. This means that the surveys are likely not representative of the population as a whole, but are biased to the hard-core types who participate in the "meta-game" of forum trolling. In this particular case, it seems possible that people who are interested in social issues in games were more likely to complete the survey, possibly exaggerating the results. Personally, I find his numbers on this to be implausibly high. How many people do you know who have dated a friend from an on-line game? What are the odds that that person you're playing with is reasonably nearby, of compatible age, and actually the gender they claim to be? How on earth, then, do we get to nearly 1/3 of female players participating in real-life dates with people they've met in-game?
The best reasoning I've ever heard for a man to create a female character was the following:
"If I'm gonna be looking at someones ass for hours on end, I want it to be cute and female."
Ira