While
it strikes some people that meeting someone compatible in an
MMORPG is like a shot in the dark, the opposite might be more
accurate. MMORPG players who are working in real life tend to
work in the IT industry (36% of employed EQ players, N=1099),
and most MMORPG players tend to have had previous experience
with table-top RPGs (68% of EQ, DAOC, UO, AC, and AO combined,
N=3415). IT workers are typically analytical and rational; RPG
players are typically imaginative and idiosyncratic. Both tend
to be non-conformist. In other words, people who play MMORPGs
are probably similar in more ways than not. When you think about
it, people who enjoy simulated battles, level advancement, and
item accumulation in medieval worlds using sword and spell metaphors
under the D&D system probably share other interests and
attitudes. And the MMORPG effectively keeps away people who
do not share those interests and attitudes. And thus, the following
kinds of remarks by players are fairly common:
We've discovered that we share many values
and beliefs. These relationships are different from my RL
relationships because it was much easier to open up to someone
under the relative anonymity of online communication. [m,
26]
We have more in common then most my real
life friends. [f, 33]
Meeting someone compatible in EverQuest would
only be a shot in the dark if you believed that the players
of EQ come from an evenly-distributed cross-section of the
general population, which is probably not the case. Thus,
another reason why MMORPG players are able to form relationships
online is because the people they meet in these worlds tend
to be more compatible than a random person they meet in real
life. It's similar to meeting someone on a message board about
the French culinary arts during the late Renaissance. The
interest is so focused that other shared attitudes are highly
likely.
In other words, each MMORPG effectively pre-selects
for compatibility among its players. The genre, medieval as
opposed to futuristic, of each MMORPG probably influences
this to a certain degree. Because Sony is developing both
EverQuest 2 and Star Wars Galaxies, it is fair to assume that
their marketing people think that these two games will attract
somewhat different kinds of players; otherwise they would
be competing with themselves. Thus they will probably attract
a different subset of the overall population, facilitating
compatibility.
Even though compatibility between players
is higher in MMORPGs than between strangers on a street, another
important factor artificially boosts the sense of compatibility,
and encourages players to feel that the people they meet are
more compatible with them than they really are. It has been
well-documented that people tend to like those with similar
attitudes and ideas. In psychology, this is known as the "law
of attraction". Relationships in MMORPGs, much the same
way as in real life, typically begin with a shared attitude
or belief - such as "Oh, you grew up in Chicago too?"
or "Yeah, I agree with you that she was out of line there."
The "law of attraction" states that it is the proportion
of shared attitudes rather than the number of shared attitudes
that matters. So, if Jane knows only one thing about Bob and
they feel the same way about that one thing, then they have
a 100% concordance. If Jane goes on to find out 19 more things
about Bob and only 4 others match, then the concordance rate
is down to 25%. Thus, Jane likes Bob less than she did at
the beginning.
The internet is very good at hiding differences
because a lot of physical cues we use to judge others are
missing - clothing, hair style, speech inflection, accent,
age, appearance, expressions and gestures among others. Oftentimes
in real life, we feel we would never get along with another
person just from these physical cues alone. But in online
relationships, the concordance tends to remain high because
so many cues are missing. Until given explicit information
otherwise, people tend to assume that others are similar to
themselves. Therefore, this sense of concordance is augmented
because similarity is assumed for many of those missing cues.
The following player puts a different slant on this point.
They are good friends due to the fact you
must throw all prejudices away about looks, language impediments,
color, race everything related to physically meeting a person.
This is similar to RL friends I believe. In RL a close friend
is one who you have looked past all that stuff previously
mention and you like the person inside. [m, 28]
This is a particularly salient factor
in the formation of romantic relationships. The initial stages
of passionate love tend to be marked by an idealization of
the other person; they become god-like, flawless, and perfect
in every way. The thin communication channel in online environments
promotes this projection of an ideal onto another person because
it lets people idealize much more than there really is while
hiding the flaws as much as possible. These idealizations
are enforced by the game metaphors themselves - warriors are
strong and heroic, clerics are healing and graceful etc. Thus,
these metaphors also encourage projecting a superhuman idealization
upon another player apart from the underlying inflated sense
of compatibility.
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