Investigating How Long-Distance Couples Use Digital Games to Facilitate Intimacy

My husband and I play Wingspan together when I’m traveling for work. He likes board games in general, so it’s something familiar for both of us. And Wingspan is complex enough to reward skill, but also random enough that the outcome isn’t guaranteed when players are of different levels.

When I broke my leg in 2006, I had a Windows machine and a modem. I searched around to discover a game that could occupy my free time. I wanted a puzzle game: I knew that much. I was looking for multiplayer games, so I happened to find “Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates” whose introductory game, Bilging, was essentially “Bejeweled” in a co-op MMOG context.

I loved the game and the concept so much that I stuck around for years. Eventually, I met a woman who was from Catalonia. And we began a long-distance romance. And for months, our romance built on the foundation of our crew and our pirate flag, and our community-building within the game’s context. We won many victories and pillaged much booty, and eventually she offered to come and visit me where I lived in Arizona.

She visited for a few weeks, during which we visited my parents, and we found ourselves engaged to be married. Thereafter, we continued our game-based LDR, but she also insisted that I not only upgrade to ADSL, but also that I travel to visit her in Spain.

It turns out that real life was far more difficult for me to manage a romantic relationship. It fell apart, and so did the airline that was supposed to take me home. My parents intervened, rescuing me and bringing me home, but I was profoundly damaged by that experience, and honestly, if some kind of romance develops online, you’d better test it ASAP in real life, lest either of you be deceived by the masks worn in online communities, especially any type of game.

I met my wife playing World of Warcraft some 16 years ago. She played a protection paladin, and I was a restoration shaman who was pretty new to doing group content. She had been looking for a healer for a heroic dungeon she and her friends were about to do, and I messaged her. We all got on really well, and three of us (myself, my wife, and one friend from that original group of five) still play WoW to this day.

It can be mind boggling to think how different my life would've been if I had been on a different server at that time; if I didn't play a healer; if I'd been an Alliance character instead of Horde; or if I hadn't been reading trade chat or just plain hadn't been online at that moment. Lots of variables had to be in place for us to meet.

I know several people who have met online like this. I'd concur with the authors that working together to achieve an objective is kind of table stakes for an actual relationship. I've always felt that meeting someone in class and working together on homework and what not was something like that. But the key for me is that when you work with someone on a project you get a better understanding of how they approach things and how their values stack up.

Value stacks are something I heard about in a "Marriage and Family" class in college where the professor discussed that if you value say "economy" more than "time", you spend a lot of time to save a few cents, but if you reverse that stack order your spend extra cents to avoid spending the time. If the person you're dating has a very different stack than you do, it will be a source of problems going forward and doesn't suggest you'll have a successful marriage.

Playing video games together should certainly be a way to get a handle on how someone's values stack up relative to yours.

How things have changed. When my spouse and I lived in different cities for several months, we stayed in touch thanks to...

America Online!

It turns out AOL was the only service that allowed dial up access in two different places without paying for two accounts. That was around 1993. And of course we didn't want to rack up long-distance phone bills. It was before AOL even allowed access to the Web.

The interviews in section 4 are particularly informative for people trying to start a long distance relationship and want to determine compatibility with their partner. The items also apply to in-person romantic interactions, but multiplayer video games offer structure.

  - Games also provide couples with “constant opportunit[ies] to come up with new silly things” (C9A), primarily inside jokes and topics of conversation that they discuss outside of their time spent playing together

  - “I take competitive games pretty lightheartedly, so it’s not as if I get upset or anything. I think it’s funny when I die. I think it’s funny when he dies. I think it’s funny when we trade and we both kill each other. It’s a nice playful feeling to have a one-up over him or jokingly having beef with each other.”

  - when asked as to the value C6 derives from menial in-game tasks such as raids versus the value of open-world exploration, C6B used the analogy, “It’s like doing chores [together] versus going on a date.”

I credit ESO for helping with my LDR over 7 years. Time on the phone wouldn’t have been the same. With games you are doing things together and sharing experiences.

It is quality time in a reduced quality world.

When my wife and me went to university in different cities we met online most evenings in World of Warcraft, doing stuff together. Helped a lot during the few years of physical separation to stay in touch, plus now I have a wife who actually „gets it“ when I say cannot quickly go away from the computer for some time when healing a dungeon group and vice versa.

HCI looks like a ripe field

I get the impression dating via games is becoming much more common in general.

Anecdotal example - I'm 39 and used to be an avid counterstrike player, and back in my days (2005-2014) it was 99.9% men. But every so often I play it now and I've been surprised by the number of women I've played with, and doubly surprised by the number of them who have made flirtatious advances. So much so that if I was single I'd almost consider it a reasonable avenue for meeting someone.

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