Making Friends and Being Smart Online

One of the most interesting and also dangerous aspects of online multiplayer games is also one of the biggest parts of these games, its massive multiplayer aspect. The picture above is from a game called Second Life and it shows actual characters (run by real people) meeting up at a specific location at a specific time. This is what people do! There are millions of people who play World of Warcraft and you can see them all in the game. You can run by a famous celebrity (some have been known to play the game and others are less known to do it here!) and not even know it! But the biggest danger that this possesses is the fact that it is all anonymous essentially and you never know who could be lying or trying to dupe you, and someone who is actually being friendly. The important thing is though, you CAN make friends and mess around in World of Warcraft for example, and it is really cool to do.

When I first got into the game, I had my brother and my cousin who joined the game around the same time as me and we all shared in that experience together. Of the three of us over the next ten years of us playing on and off, I was often labeled by my brother and cousin as the "guy who always seemed to be most role-playing." They were referring to my imaginative side where if someone randomly walked by me and was a higher level than me and said something like "Halt, soldier!" I would be the one most likely to stop and salute him in game and respond as if it was real life. I am not joking here people, there were times where I would go on a random side thing like this with a random person who said something or helped me out and completely ignore my quests and things to do. There are even actual realms where they are designated as "role-playing" for the hardcore fans who are all about talking correctly, addressing people, having people with specific roles, and playing it as if your in game character is a real personality who answers to someone and meets up with people. It is fun to do and makes the game very immersive. A key thing about the whole spectrum of this though is that you can make friends if you really want to.

In an article titled Making Friends in MMORPGs the author, Lisa Fritcher, goes in depth about the various ways that people often try to make friends. There are ways like I mentioned before such as doing something nice for another person, helping them with a quest, healing them, or even just as simple as waving to them randomly sometime. Lisa mentions that sure, many people will often ignore you but there are plenty of people that I have even met in my experience that want to make friends and aren't mean like that. For example, before I stopped playing most recently about a year ago, I was in a really cool group (guild, as called in the game) where me, the leader of the guild, and another main member, would meet up as the main three and talk to each other about ideas and upcoming events for the group. We also would organize meet ups of all our members in one of the main cities in the game where we can all hang out. It had absolutely nothing to do with the in game elements but it was fun just being silly with other people. The main leader ended up becoming my actual friend and we talked a lot even about our lives and such. Yeah, to my mother and to many people that is a very dumb thing to do because you don't know anything about them, but to me, if you are cautious enough not to reveal a lot about you and also any other account information, its okay. There were plenty of people in the guild that I was friends with and I would chat with them all the time and talk about random things. People like communicating with someone that way because honestly anonymity sometimes makes people feel more secure and less embarrassed talking like that to real life friends. In my humble opinion, the aspect of communicating and making friends in the game is something that makes the game more fun because they are real people out there and a lot of them are just as silly and fun to talk to as you are.