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Don't Dismiss Online Relationships As Fantasy
Columnist Regina Lynn has a look at how online relationships seem to be blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. "The common thread among these stories is that people get deeply involved in online relationships and make decisions about their real lives. Calling any of these online relationships 'fantasy' dismisses the impact they have on the people involved and on those closest to them... I have yet to encounter anything that challenges my core belief: Relationships are real wherever they form."
Relationships are only as real as the people in them. If the person is pretending to be something their not, even by a little bit, that can be greatly magnified online. As long as the relationship STAYS online, it's fine... But meeting the person in real life can be a disaster.
So sure, don't just dismiss them as fantasy, but don't just accept them as reality, either. Same as pretty much everything else in the world.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The author doesn't mention this, but I would just like to state that this usually does not apply to MMORPGs. I have seen "friendships" breakup so someone could boost their Stamina. While I'm sure some real friendships do take hold in that environment, most are purely superficial. Or at least that has been my experience in my 6 or so years of online gaming.
recently i had a discussion with a friend concerning the nature of community in general and in particular the relationships that make up the online gaming experience. the emotions felt are real. the connections made between individuals are real. therefore imo online relationships are real just as the ones i experience in the office or at home or at the coffee shop are. however, while they may be real, because they comprise real human experience, they are qualitatively different. and i think that this is where it becomes difficult. we haven't related to each other in the ways presented through this new medium, ever. this means that in the social background the rules have yet to be established, the presupposed boundaries and entry points are not agreed upon, leaving us in a liminal stage. it appears to me that once these things are more hashed out the debates about the 'reality' of the nature of online relationships will fade.
They are real alright.
Depends. As I have noticed, online relationships' realness depends on how well they pass the test of time, and how well the relationship survives the shit it goes through.
Now that I come to think about it, it's the exact same thing in real-life relationships. Real-life one night stands or relationships that live no longer than a couple of weeks have little credibility.
You just got troll'd!
Your friend is an idiot, and he has deliberately harassed people during an online event. Thats what it means. It doesnt matter whether it is allowed by that game's rules or not - it is an uncivil act. If you need an analogy, there are still countries/cultures in the world that allows you go eye for en eye -> you can legally kill someone who accidentally dropped a brick on one of your close relative's head killing him/her.
Story tells me that your friend was a socially disturbed wannabee. Which, i can empathize much, actually, for i was one of the socially disturbed wannabees who sought out wannabees like your friend and whacked them with great pleasure.
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I know multiple couples who are now married, 2 of which have children, who met online in a band's message forum (Eisley's Laughing City) so it can work. I've dated a couple girls through the forum but i don't have the personality for long distance relationships. With one I was very much in love but the distance just erodes things away.
I always shake my head when i hear respected professionals denounce online relationships as fake. It just goes to show they have no understanding of the online culture.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I don't see the problem. The internet is just a communication-medium. Sure they've got the right to be pissed.
Nobody was physically harmed, but quite possibly somone had their fun spoiled. Purposefully destroying the fun of others is rude, regardless of how it happens.
Similarily, if you're sitting in a park and having a quiet talk with someone, you'd be annoyed at someone who decided to leave their ghetto-blaster, playing the soundtrack of a porn-movie at full volume 2 meters away from you. This action too, hurts noone physically (aslong as it's not loud enough to be hearing-damaging) but nevertheless I think you'd find most people would be annoyed at it.
Is it ridicoloous for an amateur theatre-group to have a play where a wedding is part of it ?
And if not, why would it be more or less ridicolous if the players use online avatars rather than their own physical bodies ?
Does the ridicolousness change if some of the players involved have a crush on eachothers ? It's not as if it's unheard of for actors who *play* a couple to also *be* a couple. (or to become one during the period of the play)
I guess I just don't get it. Are relationships that depend in part or in whole on letters, telephones or any other method of communication not "real" ? Why'd it make a difference if your messages go trough the internet rather than trough the telephone-network ?
In all cases you're talking to real people. In all cases there's a real chance that one of the involved persons are less than completely honest. That's part of life, nothing new about it.
Maybe I'm biased. My first girlfriend I learned to know to a significant part trough writing old-fashioned letters. We had 2-3 wonderful years together. My wife I met trough exchanging email. I find the two situations to be very similar, and don't see what's so special about one being "online" and the other being in "real life" at all. If we'd been chatting or role-playing together online, I don't know what the fundamental difference between that and telephone should be.
I wonder what the actual percentage of 'relationships' online have turned out where one of them was being clearly deceitful, i.e. a male pretending to be female. It's probably really really low, yet people have this unreal anxiety that they can't trust someone simply because they haven't met them face to face.
Sure, caution is needed, but many people are finding love online, and if it works for them, can't we be happy for them? It's hard to meet people in today's society. It's not like we have town dances or whatever the devil they did 100 years ago. (yes, i'm sure some town's have dances still). And really, in the 19th and early 20th century many relationships developed via letters. My grandmother used to send daily 'what's up' postcards to people in the next town before phones, and when phones came along I'm sure many people new each other first only through that medium. So I don't think this is a new phenomenon. If you make the assumption that the other person is honest and fall in love with them, and that assumption is correct, you win. If it somehow isn't, well, there are 50 ways to leave your lover.
Based off what I've seen, we could all use more lovin, online or otherwise. Won't get it as easy by pigeonholing your possible relationships avenues.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
isn't it about swordplay and magic and killing things? it's called escapism: a place for people to go and do things they can't do in real life. therefore, you can't hold the standards of behavior of reality against it
so the guy made a bloody raiding party on a wedding. in reality, that's front page horrible news. in everquest, it seems to me to be par for the course
why do you expect any different, why do you think you ever could expect any different? everquest: people have swords and spells. they hurt things. that's the whole damn point of it to begin with: pointless violent escapism. and that's not bad: it's a harmless outlet
i don't think you are deluded. i don't think you are taking something too seriously. i just don't think you understand the rules here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How can a comment that restorts to name-calling like this be modded up and not listed as a Troll?
Not to mention your analagy is completely irrelevant. We're talking about a game where the point of it is to go around and kill things. So what are you saying, that the people should go after the wedding slasher and cast a spell on him? Well guess what? It's a game! It's perfectly "legal" for them to do that if they want...
Or are you even suggesting that they are justified to go to the guy's "real world" house and cause him physical harm? If so, that makes you the "socially disturbed wannabee", my friend...
Another example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in action.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
My business: Farstrider Studios.
The idea that relationships online aren't real is, as said multiple times above, is absurd. A relationship regardless of where it forms and in what form it takes is real. You can compare online relationships with relationships you develop at work. You encounter those people only at work and have varying degrees of intensity in the relationship between simply saying hi to each other out of a sense of "we both work here" to inviting a dude over to your cookout. Most work-born relationships stay at work. Online relationships are very, very similar. Most can be quite small in flavor and don't mean much, but like any place where you interact with people, they can develop into greater things. I have a lot of online relationships that don't mean much to me and that truly exist only online. And by the word relationships I'm talking about interaction varying between acquaintances and life partners. You can break it down into stimuli > response and get into arguments over "what really constitutes reality?" The main thought seems to be that if you meet face to face, you're meeting for real when in fact a chatroom is really interaction between multiple people. So why do I have to see their face in order to say I know them? I can say I know several without having met them or seen a picture (or having had hard evidence they are who they claim to be). But to counter that same statement, I don't think I would be as good a friend with my best friend (the one I met online) if I hadn't met them face to face. Meeting someone irl does have an impact, I believe, due to the intensity of information you gain about someone by seeing them. You immediately know their gender, relative age and appearance and can then tell things about their personality by their movements, the way they speak and form their words talking to you without the advantages or disadvantages of typing (the latter you can get from a phone call as well...). In an online relationship you can control what information gets to the other person, and it's harder for them to read nuances and subconsciously judge you. But none of this means that a relationship between you and another human being is any less "real" if its is online. Insert some more stuff that sounds soapbox-esque.
Relating online is also totally different to spending time with someone for real. In real life you can't do funny animated emotes like on MSN, you have to use your actual emotions. You also have to go out and eat and generally do things which are more focused on the fact that you are with the person. When you are just chatting online, be it in text or voice, you are usually doing other things, but if you do that in real life then it's considered rude. People can also be fun in a purely virtual situation, but dull in real life. Like my ex girlfriend. She didn't even like the taste of alcohol (not saying that you need alcohol to have fun, but she could have done with relaxing a bit). Whoopee -.-
which is totally what she said
Similar thing happened in WoW with a funeral. I think it was an in-game funeral for someone's character who allegedly died IRL, but I'm not sure. The video's floating around on YouTube I believe. Point is, not only was it hilarious, but it's kind of the nature of the beast. If you are on a PvP server, where the rules dictate that you can be attacked and killed while you're in certain areas at any time, you have to expect that someone might actually do it. In this case, the funeral folks were whining that the group who attacked them wasn't role-playing, that they were griefers, etc. but the real reason they were upset is because they couldn't impose their sense of gravitas, their way of enjoying the game, on the other people playing. Remember when you were a kid and a girl wanted your GI Joe's to be in her My Little Pony wedding, whereas you wanted to launch rockets at the ponies? Same deal. You can't make people have your fun.
So how does this relate to the topic? Well, the way I see it, MMORPG's are basically like IRC with fighting and kewl graphics. You get attached to your character, you get in to the game because you have fun playing it, but you also are interacting with other people, and you definitely do form relationships of a sort. And no doubt you can form friendships which are totally valid, and they might even translate to the real world. But that's because you're sharing something in common with the real person you're communicating with. If you're friends with someone you've met in a game, you're friends with the scruffy twentysomething who's in to football and listens to metal, not the 45th level undead rogue he's playing.
If you actually are falling in love with a 20th level paladin, you need to go outside.
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Right, because no one puts on perfume or aftershave to hide their true scent in person.
And no one works on changing their voice so they can appear to be more (or less depending) authoritative than their normal voice makes them seem.
And no one dresses up (or down) to try and mask their socio-economic status from whatever social circle they're trying to get into.
And no one flat out lies about themselves in the real world too. All perfectly honest.
Just because you're close enough to a person that you could slap them, doesn't mean the person is any less of a mirage than they are online. Hell, in the world of blogs, you can often find out more about someone than you can from meeting them.
True in the context of this article. Online relationships that involve any hint of intimacy is fantasy. True intimacy can only be achieved through physical closeness. This is just a bunch of crap designed for the modern age.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
This is writing by a columnist, not a study or any kind of rigorous analysis. It is written by someone whose job is to celebrate and market sexual neurosis as a way of spicing up Wired's otherwise geek-heavy material. It is not science. It doesn't even pretend.
This reminder brought to you by the people out there who haven't yet succumbed to iPhone-style hype religion about the internet, technology or humanity.
Thank you for reading. You will now be returned to your regular neurotic programming.
technical writing / development
I think meeting people online is a great way to meet new and interesting people, with the added fact that you *generally* get an idea about a person from their profile or what they say without the hassle of shouting into their ear in a bar or the discomfort of a first date. I went onto a couple of sites when I first moved to Vancouver, in addition to meeting people in day-to-day situations, online helped me meet quite a few new and interesting people that I wouldn't have met in a strange city. Indeed I first started chatting to a girl a 2 years ago and we kept in touch via the site and msn for several months before going on a first date - we've just got married and she's 5 months pregnant (wahoo).
Obviously there's dangers to meeting people and forming relationships online, but there's similar dangers to meeting someone in a store or in a bar - the advantage that online provides is you can figure out generally if the person is genuine, their likes and dislikes and it *can* save several dates and then realizing you like different things.
If it worked for me.. it can work for anyone else.. but just like everyday life, you have to keep your wits about you.
If you're just hanging out with friends and chatting, it doesn't really matter what combination of people you have in real life or in a game. When trying to accomplish something, however, you have to deal with the jerks who are excellent salesmen or the lead engineer who's a sociopath, just because they have the needed skill or are part of a needed class. Meanwhile, the superfluous classes are marginalized in the business world as well, and are typically paid less. You other examples are also all reminiscent of real life: Trying to schedule meetings with a bunch of busy people is exceedingly tricky, especially if it's last minute. Playing 5 vs. 5 basketball without your center is laughable, and you're probably not going to have much fun when your team is defeated effortlessly. Danielle is a busy and popular girl, and she may only have time for you once a week or so.
What you should be complaining about is not that the game differs from real life, if anything, it's too much like real life at the office.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I too met my wife online, and get funny looks when telling people so.
We met almost 12 years ago at a place called Shadow BBS, hosted at the Illinois Institue of Technology, it's all but gone now (I think it's still running, but always empty) but in the heyday of telnet BBSs it had a 55 user limit and commonly a 40 person queue. She's not the first woman I met online, so I can attest to the numerous posters above being accurate in the 'crap shoot' type description they're offering.
In our case however, we've been together for nearly 11 years, married for soon-to-be 8 years. Needless to say it worked out. Through all my relationships, online and offline, I've realized one piece of advice that seems to be accurate, and I'll give it to you now.
Relationships (regardless of online/offline status) work in the long term if and ONLY if:
A) it is a marriage of convenience for both parties, and that is -understood- by both parties, or
B) the people involved are (or at least CAN be) best friends.
Option B above is where it's at for people actually seeking a real relationship. Too often I hear people spouting bullshit like 'we're too good of friends' or 'I don't want to spoil the friendship'. Really now, people ACTUALLY think that spending a significant portion (likely the greatest portion) of your life with someone who turns you on but pisses you off is superior somehow to living and getting sexual gratification from your best friend. Foolish.
My wife and I have a marriage in which the longest fights take about 6 hours, and we only have one of those every couple of years. The ability to look at someone and know that you truly LIKE THEM is such a problem solver. It facilitates forgiveness and compromise. The vast majority of that friendship groundwork was laid out in our time talking to each other online. I know I liked this person, I knew we had a similar sense of humor, and I knew she was the kind of person I admire.
Okay, so saying 'I KNEW' is strong there, but once you meet someone it (in my experience) doesn't take very long at all to figure out if someone was misrepresenting themselves, and by how much. She was the real deal. Once I SAW her, the physical attraction (which was already rather strong, she was shaped in a way I particularly enjoy) was boosted significantly by the knowledge of just how COOL this person was (from my POV, of course).
Here's my rant in summary:
Real Life and On Line relationships are different, yes, but they cover a lot of common ground, and can certainly have real and lasting effects on each other.
One more (very condensed) example: Back in the dial-up BBS days there were some kids at my school that I never really liked, some of who I had never really met (2700 student high school), but we ran into each other on the boards. Some of those relationships grew into honest and strong friendships, some of them grew into bitter contempt, but most of them had consequences that spanned the RL/OL divide.
Remember kiddies: A big chunk of what is 'you' is an in-training neural-net. Any input who's signal is strong enough to evoke a non-rote response is also re-writing your personality as it does so. Just because what you're experiencing is symbolically represented doesn't mean it's not being experienced.
They existed solely in your head. Most people can also find someone who has a relationship with them in their head.
There is no two way communication. There is your feeling towards someone else, it does not mean they have the same relationship with you.
Fortunately, when the fantasy is smashed, most people can get up and go on..but some keep living their fantasy until they believe it is true.
The problem with online relationships, is that people bond(i.e. have mutualy ralationship fantasy) without key data. Looks, mannerisms, daily behaviour off line.
All of which is important, for very real reasons.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm a huge internet troll, mainly because i know i couldn't get away that kind of behavior in the real world. my personality online and off are night and day. here i am loud angry and rude. in real life i am quite pleasant. for me, the internet represents catharsis: a mental taking out the trash that leaves me capable of not blowing my stack in the real world
in other words, my personality here is not only completely unlike my personality in real life, my personality here allows me to be someone else in real life. and i completely understand the boundaries
This attitude is precisely the reason I despise internet trolls. Not because of the whole signal-to-noise ratio thing; newbies posting stupid questions and other minor breaches of nettiquette accomplish roughly the same thing and I don't mind them at all. No, the reason I hate trolls is because they treat the internet like some kind of damned videogame and other people on it like NPCs at worst, other players to be "beaten" in the "game" at best. But despite the fact that you're accessing the internet through a keyboard and screen, it's not a damn game. And I don't mean that the internet should be a serious, demure place of pure business and scholarship either; I'm here to have fun more often than I'm here to do work. I just mean that the internet is less like baseball and more like a game of catch, less like the debate team and more like chatting in the living room with your friends. It's not a competition, you can't win at it, and so playing manipulative social games trying to get certain reactions out of certain people for fun (or "catharsis" as you say) is just as despicable as if you were to treat IRL conversations with your friends that way. (Granted, some people do the same thing in real life, and I'd consider them assholes too).
Do you assume a different persona and play social games when you converse over the phone? How about through postal mail, on the off chance that you actually write letters to people? Why is the internet any different? It's just another means of communication - one which, due to its breadth and efficiency, is if anything MORE like real life than the phone or mail.
The same thing applies to people who are dicks in the non-game aspects of online games, e.g. game chat. Yes, if you're playing a competitive game the objective is to blow up the other guy or what have you, and you shouldn't complain that people are being "mean" when they do so efficiently. At the same time, there's this little thing called good sportsmanship which has been pretty well established in real world competitive activities, and I see no reason why it applies any less online. So, just because someone is competing against you in something that actually IS a game on the internet, doesn't mean that when you communicate with them within the context of the game (but "out of character", if such a concept is relevant) you're free to be a dick, anymore than it's OK to shout demeaning insults at the other team in a real-world sport, or to gloat over your victory or throw a tantrum over your loss.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for people behaving differently in person and online. Someone may be more or less comfortable in one venue than in the other, and so censor certain parts of themselves where they're not comfortable expressing such traits. But then, that just gets back to what the person you're responding to was saying; some people reveal their "true personality" more online than they do in real life. If you might be inclined to be an asshole in person but don't feel that that's OK, so instead you're an asshole on the internet (which honestly I've never seen you be, here on Slashdot at least), then that means that somewhere in your "true personality", you're an asshole, and you just censor that in real life and let it out on the internet so it doesn't stay bottled up. Even if the actual personas you're adopting online are all fake and consciously so, just put on for the response that other people give
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."