My mind is racking itself over the mental coals particularly on this topic. Over whether my social experiences over the internet particularly are real. Especially over my tenure playing this particular mmo from vanilla, BC, WOTLK till now… I still can’t fathom, and it may very well be the autism causing my emotions to blister, and burn into a raging inferno…
Trying to force itself into believing that all of the people I met, all the pain I incurred over the years from past friendships were in fact real. Or just clever facades, juxta positioned into elaborate plans to increase their social standing in the community. Is the passerby where I lightly joked to a couple weeks ago a genuine instance of human interaction. Or just the a light blimp in me trying to be socially interactive.
I don’t know What do you think from yall’s own interactions?
The Pook has been engaged in some form of “online” since I was able to gnome my Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem (which came with a really cool rotary dial phone that said Commodore on it) onto my favourite Atari BBS (it was called The Prison Mistress BBS, it was in Toronto). Yeah I had to write my own terminal emulator to convert Petscii to Atascii but it was the cool BBS to be on.
So believe me when I tell you, yes your internet interactions are real. It’s just a matter of distance that differentiates them from your interactions IRL.
All interactions ultimately take place within an internal mental projection based on the information you’ve received during that interaction. If the interaction took place where you were within the sphere of receiving sensory information like sight, touch, taste, or smell your internal projection would be different from an interaction had at a distance but it would be no more, nor less “real” in any meaningful sense.
Your feelings don’t become any less valid with distance either. So your feelings from an online interaction are just as “real” as the feelings you would get from a closer interaction.
There are advantages that might make “virtual” interaction easier or even more desired than “physical” interactions. There are disadvantages too. None of this alters the fact that your experience of the interaction is still “real”. It exists. It is your experience.
It’s not a binary choice; it depends on the person you’re interacting with. Some people are sincere in their overtures of friendship. Others are just transactional and you’ll be forgotten as soon as you’re not longer convenient.
In other words: online is like real world interactions. It all depends on the people.
Man you made a make-shift server by turning a computer into a dummy terminal sending out CLI’s into other people’s old computers acting as a message board. You also changed the symbols for commodore into a different language set. Pretty cool old timer.
[quote=“Pookamhura-moon-guard, post:2, topic:2108906”]
There are advantages that might make “virtual” interaction easier or even more desired than “physical” interactions. There are disadvantages too. None of this alters the fact that your experience of the interaction is still “real”. It exists. It is your experience.
[/quote] my educated guess is that maybe I got burned by a couple that I thought was genuine people that really did care for me. Maybe I am a fool in this
It depends entirely on your investment in the experience and the value you give to its meaningfulness. The same thought experiment can be aligned with stuffed animals, your favorite baseball cap, a lucky pencil, etc. Some inanimate things we seem to build a relationship with out of strange affinity. We feel those things give us comfort (the stuffed animal), confidence (the baseball cap), or better probability of luck (the pencil). When such items are lost or destroyed, there can be real emotions attached to their demise sadness, anger, hopelessness. Yet in reality, it was our investment in their meaning that gave them any significance in how they made us feel.
We create our own reality. Friends, even if they are superficial can be meaningful to us. Shallow gestures can be just enough to get us through hard times until we heal or mature enough to see we’re being manipulated. Likewise, if we’re overly paranoid, we can accidentally write off people acting in good faith as an attempt to play us as fools; again until we mature and heal enough to see the validity of their intentions.
So. Maybe it’s never about them, but about where we are on our own personal journey of self discovery.
Of course they’re real. I met my best friend through internet interactions. I met a man 13 years ago through internet interactions and I’m married to him. 90% of the people who came to our wedding were garnered from internet interactions. Most of them were met in this game in fact! Anything that happens to you has value and is therefore real.
It’s a complicated question. I don’t think that internet friendships can ever replace real life human interaction, but that doesn’t make online friendships fake. You’re a person, the individuals you play with regularly are also people. Even if you never meet them in real life, that can still be considered a friendship.
The reasons why I don’t think online friendships can ever compete with real life friendships is because most human communication is non-verbal. Actually seeing the person you’re talking to, picking up on their mannerisms, being able to physically dap up your homie, etc. is how we were meant to interact. I don’t necessarily have any data handy to back this up, but I firmly believe these things are paramount for close bonds.
Maybe it’s my “old man yells at cloud” take here, but I miss the days when the internet wasn’t ubiquitous. I think that the rise of parasocial relationships and the total reliance on the internet to communicate with others has created a deep sense of loneliness in people that contributes heavily to the unraveling of the social fabric of society and created many of the problems we’re grappling with today.
Anyway, I won’t keep ranting about that. The point is, yes, your internet friendships are real and valid in their own way… But they’re no substitute for good old fashioned face-to-face human interaction. So play WoW (or any other game) with your online friends, but don’t forget to make friends in your community too. So here’s me, a monk player, essentially telling you it’s all about finding balance. So zen. Much chi. Wow.
Good point to be made - while all of my friendships/relationships started out as online, they eventually were taken offline and that time in meat space, so to speak, proved if they were going to be successful, long-standing friendships because we were all exposed to each other’s non-verbal methods of communication. So like… seeing each other in reality is the real key.
This does bring some level of clarity to me, I was a notable individual back on my old server on Earthenring… Loved by all, but the turning point was me getting revenge on a alleged female predator that took advantage of me using my hormones. I tore her a part from the community.
Guess I just shift to the more painful memories most of the time.
I deleted my main a long time ago, so forgive the altposting. The answer is more no than yes. The more senses you use in a memory, the stronger it is. A moment you did not touch or smell or hear will fade so quickly compared to others. People can delete, block, and ghost you so easily.
There’s a little “yes”, too though. If you push that friendship and meet IRL obviously it’s different. But that’s rare. On the other hand, I remember some storylines that happened in 2005-2008 pretty clearly because they were special.
I would say overall WoW RP is not really worth it, but it does (badly) fill in the holes sometimes if you’re not getting social interaction anywhere else.
I think the “normal” older view on friendships is changing. This isn’t just in WoW, but many games. There’s a difference still, yes, between in-person friends and friends you play with online. Probably a good question is: who do you spend more time with?
These connections do matter though. I’ve had some friends on the game for a while, longer than some of my friendships in-person. They know me more, and I love that. Is there a connection missing sometimes? Sure. But with the internet not gonig anyway any time soon, I think it’s great.
I approach everything with the mindset that friendships/connections may evaporate at any point. I think just being grateful and happy for the joy and fun you get during it matters a ton. I try and view it that way.
Are you going to encounter bad apples? Yes. You will in both places. Just as you mgiht meet people who use you for power and social standing in the game, it exists exacty the same in person. I think the difference is how “wide reaching” it is. In the game, it’s contained more so it looks bigger than it is. In person? Probably next-to-nothing will happen from it.
Yeah it seems a lot of roleplayers especially establishments tend to be too emotional about rp, or start gmodding away. In an aspect reminds me of what happened on Earthen Ring. I came back after taking a break from the Cataclysm xpac to see that The whole server’s roleplay became derelict. There was no roleplay anywhere, just in areas like Stormwind, or the townlonge steppes where the templars of the rose had their headquarters. So Rp became monopolized within groups.
The only way I was able to come to that determination even was to do a survey then literally fought against someone named Arialynn who was the GM of the templars… After showing her screenshots the state of the rp on the server, and compared it along side to Moon Guard at that time.
Due to choosing moon guard their main smear was that i did ERP, and started to change my earthenring wiki entries to show that.
(I have the archived screenshots if anyone wants them)
When you talk to a loved one over the phone, is that real? You aren’t physically close to one another, but does that really matter?
Have you ever laughed with your friends online? Cried because of something that went wrong? Gotten excited and happy that someone you know purely online is going to be jumping on to play a game with you? Have you ever expressed your feelings with these people? Felt sadness and joy? Commiserated in your shared experiences?
I think online actions are real. I think they are as real as talking to someone face-to-face. Sure, you can’t touch or smell someone, but does that make your interactions any lesser? I don’t think so.
A lot of people mention the frailty of online relationships and how quickly people can come and go from your life over the internet, and to that I say it is absolutely no different in the real world. If you have ever made friends at work, you know how quickly these people can disappear into ambiguity. How many of your friends from high school or college do you regularly talk to? When you moved out of your parents house, did that suddenly change the validity of your later interactions with them?
We are social creatures, even for those like myself who are incredibly introverted. In a way, I almost feel like being introverted makes my online friendships more important to me than otherwise.
Just like the real world, there are absolutely people who will pretend to be your friend to your face, and hate you behind your back, but to me, that will never invalidate the people I regularly speak to over the internet, whether I end up meeting them in person or not. Because at the end of the day, if it isn’t real, if our friendships online mean nothing, then why be friendly at all?
I think you’re right that being introverted makes our online friendships proportionally more important. I also think that the more introverted we are the higher our risk of substituting realer experiences for more digital ones. Like our need is so low that we’re not as motivated to find what we need IRL.
I’m not speaking for you, but I’ve noticed in the past I’ve accepted counterfeit experiences through RP as substitutes for real ones to the point of doing real harm to my social life. I know not every has that same addictive tendency, but I think you’ll find a lot of that in roleplayers.
I think MG is full of weirdos, I just love and fear you all for the mirror you hold up to me.
The internet is only as real as you make it. I have plenty of lifetime face-to-face friends I made suffering in Blades’ Edge Arena or the Spider Wing of Naxrammas. It’s also probably important to remember that when you’re playing in roleplay-oriented communities online, you’re exposing yourself to a higher baseline level of weird - which translates to a higher baseline level of crazy. Everything became a lot more relaxed when I realized that the demography around me on the internet was anything but ‘normal’.
The sooner you can accept or understand that a majority of negative experiences online, especially in places like Moon Guard, come from deeply subnormal or defective people… The sooner you’ll stop agonizing about this thing.
I think that baseline comes from roleplayers that tend to be more centered around nobility which in my opinion the troubled narcissist type of people tend to gravitate to