Turns out chatting is cheating, especially when that chatting leads to pixels in vectors in the game Second Life. A British couple recently divorced after the wife found out that the husband was cheating on her with an avatar lady of the night in the online game Second Life. My favorite part? The "virtual" private eye who was hired to track the comings and goings of the cheater.
It really should come as no surprise to the jilted lover, who met the lothario in the same game online.
"The couple met in an internet chat room in May 2003 and within six months Ms Taylor had moved from London to Mr Pollard's flat in Newquay, Cornwall. They married at a register office in St Austell in July 2005 and held a virtual wedding for their avatars in Second Life. While their online characters are young, and slim, in real life there is a lot more to Ms Taylor and the balding Mr Pollard."
What a beautiful sleight in the above paragraph. As only a Brit could pull off.
But it does bring up the question, "What is cheating?"
As we move into an era of more and more digital interaction, do the things we do online constitute genuine interaction? Even on To Catch a Predator they have to arrest the dirty pedophiles when they show up at the homes as it shows intent to follow through with written action.
But in a game that mimics real life, does fidelity count? If the man had been playing Grand Theft Auto IV and gotten a lap dance, would that have been cheating? I can see how two people who met on Second Life feel that a Second Life faux-romance is in fact a real romance. After all, it's the medium that brought them together. Surely, for the man to find another lover in the same medium is cheating, is it not?
These are the questions of our times. But fret not, the misses is ok. It seems she has started a new romance with someone else...whom she met online in World of Warcraft.
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