Virtual marriage

Yesterday my character on the French server, Honey, was attending a marriage between two guild members. There was a procession from Goldshire to the cathedral in Stormwind, a marriage ceremony there, and a party in one of the taverns afterwards. Fun guild event, but it got me thinking about virtual marriage.

This is only the second virtual marriage I attended. In the first one I was the priest performing the ceremony. That was in DAoC, my character was a friar, and I was the guild master, that's how I got that job. Well, I found the right words to say somewhere on the internet, managed to type them fast enough to make the ceremony go smooth, and the thing was a success.

I never was tempted to get married in a MMORPG myself. Mainly because I do not believe that the characters I am playing have something like a virtual life, I am not an extreme role-player. My avatars have their special character abilities, play styles, and maybe different in-game needs and goals. But when I chat, it is me speaking, not my avatar. I don't say things differently when I'm a troll warrior than when I'm a gnome warlock. When the game has some sort of alignment system, and I'm playing an evil character, that doesn't make me behave less nice than if I'm playing a good character. The quest descriptions might be different, but it doesn't make a difference to me whether I collect 10 spider venoms to save the life of an elven child, or whether I collect the same 10 spider venoms to mix a poisonous potion to kill somebody.

As my characters don't have a virtual life independant from my real life, they also have no love life independant from my love life. My wife does play World of Warcraft (but less than me), and I do have one character reserved to play with her. And she is the only one on who I would use a /kiss or /flirt emote. If she would suddenly want a virtual marriage, I'd do it. But I wouldn't flirt, marry, oder have cybersex with anyone else. That would feel like cheating on her. I mean, what would your real life significant other say if she/he found out that you married somebody else in a game?

The other problem with virtual marriages is that you never know who is playing your virtual significant other. In an old study on Everquest it was shown that half of them female characters you meet in the game are in fact played by men. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to play a character of the opposite sex, for example what you see when playing in 3rd-person-view. But whatever your position on gay marriage is, you might not be happy to have accidentally entered into one, even if it is just virtual.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:25 AM Permanent Link