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Games Entertainment

Love in the Time of Pixels 79

Posted by Zonk from the synthflesh-still-has-appeal dept.
The Escapist has piece, on this Valentine's Day, highlighting a relationship begun in a Virtual World that lead to the real life marriage of the players. From the article: "We think of these places most often as games, but there is much more going on in them than simply play. What we often forget is that any place in which two or more people can interact, whatever else it is, is a communications medium of a certain sort. Connecting via an online world - whether it's Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest or any other - is not different from connecting via a chat room, via Friendster, via telephone or even in the time-honored way people sometimes connect at a party." Have you had any successful online experiences of the online variety (that you're willing to share)?
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Love in the Time of Pixels More

Love in the Time of Pixels

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  • but MMORPG (Score:5, Funny)

    by cyrax777 ( 633996 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @01:26PM (#14717082) Homepage
    Many Males Online role playing Girls!
    • Nice one.....that is one I hadn't heard yet.
    • Many Males Online role playing Girls!

      I remember doing that when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It was funny. Of course, back then it was play-by-mail games, and BBS chats. You'd be surprised how many guys propose marriage to people they assume are girls but aren't really such.

      I used to roll a die to figure out which gender I was going to play - 1-3 male, 4-6 female - and tried to stay consistent with the persona, even when it started getting a bit silly - good thing most of my female characte

    • Re:but MMORPG (Score:3, Insightful)

      by the_tsi ( 19767 )
      Uh huh. And why not? Should people also be encouraged/forced to play their own species, race, and career in games? Am I some sort of deviate because my main character is a 300-pound orc who's probably too dumb to memorize an alphabet? Then why should it be a problem for someone to role play a gender they're not? The whole point of RPGs is pretending to be something different for a little while.
    • As a wise man once said on the now defunct lumthemad.net site,

      "They're not elves, either."

  • A charming story (Score:2, Interesting)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 )
    and the reaction to one's words after a few slipped pixels is always a good sign.

    Now if they hadn't disabled the hack in Sims 2 [eagames.com] with the latest patch ... well ...

    Let's just say that choosing an online avatar that actually corresponds to one's self is a good thing.

  • I know it's V-day and all... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PFI_Optix ( 936301 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @01:34PM (#14717161) Journal
    But this isn't really all that special or new, is it?

    I met my wife on a Counter-Strike server in 2000.

    • Re:I know it's V-day and all... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @01:40PM (#14717207)
      > But this isn't really all that special or new, is it?
      I met my wife on a Counter-Strike server in 2000.

      Brings whole new meaning to yelling "Boom! Headshot!", don't it?

      /one ticket to hell please

    • I know it's Digital-day and all... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I met my wife on a Counter-Strike server in 2000."

      You downloaded your wife?

      • Re:I know it's Digital-day and all... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by PFI_Optix ( 936301 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:35PM (#14718387) Journal
        She snuck in amidst the 247 .WAV files I was downloading. By the time I realized what happened, she'd installed her stuff in my living room and everything smelled like lavender. I'm still trying to figure out how this ring got on my finger.

        The real story: We both frequented three of the same CS servers, and I was one of the few guys that didn't spaz out that she was a girl (which is why she paid any attention at all to me). Played together a lot, started voice chatting when the server was really slow, got interested. We met in person a few months after we met online. It's not every day you find a funny, game-loving web designer who also happens to be a hot chick.

    • It sounds a bit sad to say it now, but I met my first gf on a mud, back in '95 :) A friend of mine met his wife on irc years ago too. So no, none of this seems unusual to me. I don't even agree with the premise of the story, that we "often forget", I can't imagine that anyone 'forgets', we all know full well we're interacting with other people etc.

  • Virtual Worlds vs MMORPGs... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @01:39PM (#14717201) Homepage
    Some people point out that in MMORPGs the women are really men. Generally, this is as we all know true.

    But one thing I've noticed about "games" like There [there.com] is that the more active female players generally really are female.

    Well, at least they SOUND like women on the microphone anyway. Still, my point is generally that there seems to be a major difference in games like WoW and CoH from games like There and Second Life.

    On the other hand, the pretty, skinny, barbi-like avatars of There.Com probably don't resemble the players controlling them.

    So be careful if you fall in love with that Beauty Queen in There.Com. At least in WoW if you are in love with a cow they probably really are a cow. :)

  • Online hookups? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So how many here have found their significent other in an online game?

  • It's always the same problem... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fak3r ( 917687 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @01:52PM (#14717306) Homepage
    Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!

  • Marriage is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)

    by amliebsch ( 724858 )
    Unless you're planning to have children, there is no good reason to get married, especially if you are a man. Why would you? You only expose yourself to huge liabilities and risk financial ruin. If you are happy together, that ought to be enough.
    • You could always hold out for a dowry.
    • Well, tax benefits is just one of many reasons, at least in Canada. By having a spouse, there are a lot of handy things on the tax form that can be used to save a lot of money both now, and after retirement.
      • Generally this isn't true in the 'states. Especially with the rise of two income households, the way the tax system is structured, if you actually make enough money that you PAY taxes (rather than getting everything back at the end of the year) a couple is probably better off remaining unmarried in a financial sense. This is ESPECIALLY true if they have no children. On the other hand, you do miss out on a few of the freebies from common law, joint ownershiop, automatic inheritance, etc (Although I'm rat
        • Also if you share a residence, you will automatically become "common-law spouses" which means even though you never had a ceremony, you are in fact married. Which means if you don't go through with the ceremony and do live together to save the expense of maintaining two separate residences, you may be liable for back taxes if you continue to file separately. Thus the financial reasons for not getting married may have a caveat "as long as you never get audited".

    • Re:Marriage is a scam (Score:3, Informative)

      by radish ( 98371 )
      Well, there are a few reasons. Maybe one or both of you _want_ to be married - it may be a worthless piece of paper to you but some people like the tradition & commitment.

      In my personal case, me & my (soon to be, hopefully!) fiance have different citizenships. Being married makes it _much_ easier for us to be together in whichever country we choose.

      Anyway, I met her online (through online dating though, not a game) and today, after 2 years, I pop the question. Time will tell :)
      • Maybe one or both of you _want_ to be married - it may be a worthless piece of paper to you but some people like the tradition & commitment.

        It is not a rational commitment, and acting in accordance with a tradition that has become illogical is also irrational. In your case, the citizenship factor certainly is rational benefit that is not relevant for most people, but I don't know enough about that to know whether it would outweigh the enormous liability risks.

        • Re:Marriage is a scam (Score:3, Insightful)

          by radish ( 98371 )
          It is not a rational commitment, and acting in accordance with a tradition that has become illogical is also irrational

          Why on earth are you trying to apply a logic test to human relationships? That's completly irrational. If people applied economics to relationships they'd never date (bad risk/reward), never have kids (18 years+ of unrewarded expense) and only ever sleep with prostitutes (and cheap ones at that). However, most people have emotional needs which are worth far more to them than money. You're w
          • Why on earth are you trying to apply a logic test to human relationships?

            I'm not at all, I'm applying it to a legal commitment. I don't know where you got the idea that you have to marry someone to have a relationship with them.

            If people applied economics to relationships they'd never dateI agree - I propose no such thing. It's not as if I deny the value of emotions. They are valuable, and necessary. But marriage is not an emotion. It is a legal contract. That's all. I'm not arguing against love, s

      • Congrats and good luck.

    • Re:Marriage is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gknoy ( 899301 )
      Why be married? You mean, aside from meeting someone and feeling you want to livetherest of your life with them?

      http://www.psychpage.com/family/library/brwaitgall igher.html [psychpage.com]

      Married people live longer.
      Married people have stronger finances.
      Married people have better mental health.
      Married people (statisically) have more and better sex than single people.

      And, interestingly, several of these did not really apply to couples that were merely cohabiting.
      • Wow, this is such a great example of how correlation is not causation. Rather than believe that a legal agreement magically bestows long life, wealth, and sexual gratification, what about the hypothesis that couples smart enough and happy enough to have long, successful marriages tend to be successful at other things as well, like budgeting and having a healthy lifestyle? Or how about the hypthesis that it's much easier to have a successful marriage when you're rich, healthy, and sexually compatible? Of
        • A great example of how correlation is not causation.

          There IS a correlation. Whether this is caused by being married, I don't know. It's not that correlative indices are NEVER causally related, just that they are NOT NECESSARILY causally related. I haven't read the book, and know nothing about their research. But, "studies found that married people have these benefits" seems to have a pretty clear message that a healthy marriage is NOT all bad.

          What about the hypothesis that couples smart enough and happy
          • I don't think I have presented "emotional" reasoning -- merely said "hey, several scientists believe this. Maybe it has some merit."

            I apologize that I projected that argument onto you. I've looked at these things before, and I just haven't seen any hard evidence, or any plasusible causal explanations - at least, none more plausible than the two I posted above. Rather, I suspect that this is faith-based pseudoscience, not all that much different from creationists, that starts with the unproved assumption

            • starts with the unproved assumption that marriage must be good and beneifical, and so creates results to fit that hypothesis.

              That's a very interestnig possiblity; I'm sure that several have done exactly that. Good point about people not wanting to challenge something that claims that "Marriage is good". :)

              The majority of marriages are not healthy, and not because people intend to enter unhealthy marriages. It's because they make decisions based on their emotions instead of actually thinking it through l
    • Really, you are correct. Lets take a look back at marriage...
      Greek Civilization - ~1930(roughtly) - Women couldn't own property, unless it was inherited from a passing of their husband.

      1930-Today: Women own property
      1950: Birth control clears the way for women to control their reporducticve cycles, to socialize with men and to pursue careers.
      1970-Today:
      • Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed. Expires unratified in 1985. Jurisprudence changed though, to include women and men.
      • Women are born under the mentality

  • Success Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Utoxin ( 26011 ) <utoxin@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:13PM (#14717451) Homepage Journal
    I met my wife in a text-based RPG called TowerMUSH. Many of my friends warned be to be extremely cautious, and even told me that it was a huge mistake. But we've been married for 7 years this June, and it's been great.

    A few pieces of advice for others who are getting into internet relationships: Don't treat them any differently from a real relationship, with one exception: Be especially wary of being lied too. The internet makes it so much easier. Also, NEVER RUSH. Me and my wife knew eachother for 4 or 5 months before we met in person for the first time. And then it was another 14 months past that before we got married. And that was 14 months of her living in the same apartment building as me while we dated and got to know eachother.

    So yes, it can work. It can be wonderful. But please, be careful. There are many real horror stories out there. My wife actually went through one before she met me. She had been engaged once before, and the guy cheated on her and used her, destroyed her credit, and then dumped her. The aftermath of that still hasn't gone away, though we're working on it slowly.

    • Re:Success Story (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mur! ( 19589 )
      I'll chime in to being another MUSH success story. Pre-graphical RPGs, we had text RPGs that meant a lot of typing and a lot of reading. The great thing about these is that you *know* the person on the other end of the character is being a character, but the longer you play with them, the better a feel you get for the kind of person they are (through grammar, language, etc). I think a lot of this gets lost in graphical RPGs.

      My husband and I met online and it was 2 years of casual chatting before we met in r

  • Been there, done that -- in 1990 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cwford ( 848987 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:17PM (#14717475) Homepage
    I met my future wife online in 1985. We both ran local BBSs, spent long hours chatting and a relationship quickly developed.

    We were married online in Dec. 1990. The pastor and both of us called a multi-line BBS and had several friend join as witnesses. The service was done and we were married. Later that night, we have a service IRL just to placate the family and all, but we all signed a document and had it notarized stating that our official wedding took place online.

    Evidently someone saved a transcript for posterity's sake and it surfaced on the web a few years ago:

    http://www.skepticfiles.org/aj/wed_b&c.htm [skepticfiles.org]

  • Results Not Always So Good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:24PM (#14717528) Journal
    I played AC for a while. There was one woman with two kids. She was single. She essentially hop-scotched with her kids in tow from one bad relationship to another that she initiated through the game.

    I think several of them resulted in pretty fast marragies and fast marriage endings (I can't spell marraige, sorry). In one case she deleted of one of the guys players.

    Apparently she was somewhat cute and somewhat charming - not really devious, just a nut case.

    Normally I wouldn't have cared at all, but I found it particularly disturbing that she had children and was dragging them through all of this with her.

    Ok - not so great a V day story, but the other side of the coin I suppose.


  • Back in the 90's I mudded a lot, which was effectively MMORPG without the graphics and there where people who would wander off to some secluded corner of the mud and chat and kiss and emote and all that. They often would group together. Some even, myself included, would travel hundreds of miles for face to face meetings with other mudders of the same game. I know some romances sprung that way, others died (when people finally met the person they thought was clearly someone else.)

    What was always amazing

    • You can get that in a T-Shirt [thinkgeek.com] these days too. Though to be a bit more geeky the colors are replaced with their hex equivalents.
      • You can get that in a T-Shirt these days too. Though to be a bit more geeky the colors are replaced with their hex equivalents.

        Yes. I couldn't help but notice they lifted my poem. ThinkGeek is connected with /.

  • Yes, MMOs are a perfectly good communications medium, and you can interact with others fairly well. Even better than chat or other digital, text-based means.

    The problem with meeting your signifigant other on an MMO or other game is that people generaly play games to escape from real life. MMO's in particual, people play to act out a role they don't get to in real life. The percentage of people who are acting anything like their real life personality is very small.

    I'm sure there are exceptions, but i

  • I met my boyfriends partially via online gaming. I knew them in other online contexts, but it was on a MUCK they started that things really began to happen. Things are going well but we're not at the point of marriage quite yet, either ceremonial or legal - the former probably being more likely than the latter, as America has this silly issue with families made of more than two consenting adults.
  • We were both working on an RP-centric MUD (I as programmer, her as lead builder), when we met.

    It started as one of my friends asking "What do you want for your birthday?" and I replied "To meet a girl who likes science fiction." Turns out she was online and listening to the chat at that moment...
  • My wife once dated someone she met online- it was one of the stupidest things she's ever done. However, if she had met and dated him offline, it wouldn't have been any smarter. A few of my other friends have "dated" people they met online- but the relationship rarely survived a single real life meeting, if they got that far. An unamed friend of mine brought a online date home once- only to have his date hit on his roommate the entire visit. Not surprisingly, that ended things rather quickly. L
  • One month ago today (Valentines day), I had a double match with my girlfriend, and we've spent almost every day since then together, or at least talking. It was pretty random, but it worked, and we're a pretty good match.

    I've also built some very close friendships with people I've never met or even talked on the phone with, on chatrooms.
  • I met my wife before it was a stigma to meet and date someone online. As if meeting someone in a bar is somehow better? But anyway, I digress.

    It was back on a MMORPG precursor -- a MUD -- and have been happily together for 8 or 9 years now.

    We currently play WoW together, and are the leaders of a medium sized casual guild. We're not an oddity either. Unless we just attract married couples, we have 5 other husband/wifes that are in our guild. That's 12 people out of probably 35 folks that are married

  • So my friend was a pretty good Halo player. Good enough to win some local competitions. One night, his roommate's sister showed up with some of her friends. My friend and his roommate were playing, and after the round ended one of the girls asked if she could play against my friend. He patronizingly said, "Sure? You know how to play?"

    "Well, it's been a while, but the controls should come back to me."

    "Okay, I'll go easy on you for a bit."

    Big mistake. I heard from everyone else in the room that by the t
  • About 7 years ago, I moved back to Los Angeles for work. My brother was going to law school in downtown L.A., so we decided to share an apartment.

    A week after he moved in, he complained that we only had one phone line and that I would be tying up the phone line to dial in to work. I tried to calm him down with the fact that I was going to get a cablemodem service and that we'd have a 24x7 fast connection... To which he sarcasticall said something like "oh, so that you can find a woman online... well, she
  • It's just another medium for people to come together socially, on a par with bars, clubs, personal ads, churches, parties, or any of the other myriad ways in which people meet and end up pursuing romance. Unlike those media, it comes with a bandwidth limitation on your personal interaction: you miss out on a lot of the non-verbal elements of communication. This isn't a problem if you're aware of it. But you get a lot of poor saps who mistake this throttling of bandwidth for an increased level of intimacy, l
  • I was playing City of Villains when my girlfriend came home from the supermarket and asked me to help her putting groceries into the fridge... and then I found a Nintendo DS in the bottom of her bag =D
  • This has been going on for decades - our local fishwrap is carrying the story to of one couple who via a pen-pal club in the 50's. I'm old enough to remember folks meeting via CB. I have a buddy who met his wife because he called her when working as a telemarketer!

    Nothing new here, nothing to see. Move along.

  • My wife and I met on IRC around 10 years ago. We've been together for 7 years, and married for 3. We also have a 4 month old son. I'd say things turned out pretty well.
  • We'd love to hear about your online engagement stories, too.

    Post them here at the AppleBride wedding encyclopedia (like wikipedia):
    http://www.applebride.com/pages/Online_engagement_ story [applebride.com]

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