Internet Friendship
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with How many of you actually chat with people you don’t know at all online? Except for in non-realtime communication like Blogging, commenting or web forums, I don’t really. The only exception to this is when I play World of Warcraft. And after a certain amount of time spent with people in-game, the distinction between knowing and not knowing them becomes sort of fuzzy. I saw this article today about a cop posing as a teen girl on MySpace as part of a sting to catch an “online predator”. It made me start thinking about who I talk to online and what I talk about.
The vast majority of my online communication is with people I know in real life, and when I mentioned this fact to Brian, he realized it too. We’ve had a few notable exceptions, like my AIM Conversation From Hell (annotated!) and Brian’s infamous Robot Chat. By and large however, we usually know the person we’re talking to in some sort of context. I think this is why the experience of going into a chat room when we checked out 3bubbles felt so weird. Not having real world context to put the people I was chatting with into definitely threw me for a loop.
So why does World of Warcraft feel different? I think a large part of that missing context is from body language and subtle voice cues that let you figure out who a person really is and where they’re coming from. You can get the same effect online with only text and voice chat, but it takes a lot longer. The almost shared experiences that come from raiding with the same group of people for months at a time allows you to take the measure of a person and actually get to know them. While the process is slower, the result is nearly the same. I’ve been entrusted with expensive items to hold onto in game, I’ve shared real world log in information and used other people’s accounts and I’ve even been among the first to know when someone I played with got pregnant.
The shared experiences in a game as immersive as World of Warcraft can create the same sort of friendship bonds you get the in the real world, though not as quickly nor as strongly. I think this is the real strength of MMOs. Not in the actual content they provide, but in providing a background for people to interact on. In this sort of way, repetitive content is not a hinderance, but an advantage because it allows you to pay more attention to the people you’re playing with and gives you a chance to get to know them better.
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There are a few friends-of-friends I speak with on AIM, but they are mostly people who are also involved in FIRST robotics, so we have a common ground to talk.
I also used to be in a Natural Selection (a half-life mod) clan, and voice-chatting with people for a couple of months is a pretty good way to get to know people. Usually the dialogue is more along the lines of “I need backup!”, but it can be more engaging than many of the mundane conversations you have with people day to day. After a while of ineracting with the same people, you can have a pretty good friendship going.
I would have to agree, though, that meeting someone you completely don’t know without any common ground is not a good way to get to know them. Personally, I find it rather obnoxious when people I don’t know at all friend request me on an online service. I like my friends to be just that - people I am friends with.
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Quick plug here for some work I did on this topic last semester. I studied how relationships outside of WoW affected relationships inside the game. Bottom line: synthetic worlds like WoW aren’t the emancipatory spaces they used to be in the days of MUDs. Who you know outside of the context of the game matters a lot.
Put even more simplistically, if you have no friends outside the game, I found that odds are you won’t be sucessful and have tons of friends inside the game either.
A less flippant abstract about the work, plus the paper itself and a paper about the paper (it’s a long story) is available here.
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I don’t really talk to people I don’t know in realtime communication.
I’m not big on IM so that is part of the reason. Several years ago, I used to talk to more people. Like you, it was people I meet playing on-line games like Team Fortress and Counter Strike.
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(aβ Member)
Mmmm Team Fortress… too bad Team Fortress 2 has been “under development” for like… 6 years now.
I hope it turns out like Daikatana.
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I talked to Greg Marra (first commenter) for a while on AIM before we’d ever met. He was a prospie at Olin (and made it to candidates’ weekend so we’ll see what happens
w00t) who had expressed interest in math, so whoever he was in touch with gave him my screen name. Obviously we had a common ground, namely, nerdiness and Olin but nonetheless it was hard to really get to know him over AIM and it was very cool when he finally came to campus for a visit and we hung out and chatted for a while.