A Bi-Curious Double Life

I was checking on 60 Minutes‘ schedule yesterday to see if it was a rerun or good (rerun), and I stumbled upon CBS News’ archive of real! life! murder mysteries, which I love because I’m quite an accomplished armchair detective, if I must say so myself. I was well on my way to solving this murder, Love and Lies, when I got to Page 5 and the story got a whole lot crazier. I won’t spoil it for you, go read. Come back in a few minutes and share a WTF moment with me.

13 thoughts on “A Bi-Curious Double Life

  1. What was so crazy? It was obvious the internet partner is a woman as soon as they said it would be shocking.

  2. WTF??!! Usually it’s a guy pretending to be a woman not the other way around.

  3. I thought the wtf moment was going to be that the Chris turned out to be the neighbour. “They’ve spent far too long introducing the neighbours for them to turn out to be largely irrelevant”, I thought to myself.

  4. “I won’t spoil it for you” – The post title kind of does spoil it, but it was still a very interesting, and both sad and happy story.

  5. Certainly not the norm in terms of MMO identity crisis. What pisses me off is the way that _everyone_ in the normal media writes about online games. I’m sure that they’ll never, ever get it right.

    ” It gives you the opportunity to assume another station in life. Obviously because she wasn’t happy with who she was,”

    What. The. Fuck. I can’t stand this cut rate psychoanalysis that has to accompany ever single article about MMOs. They seriously make it sound like the only reason someone would play an MMO is if it was the result of mental problems and the person’s inability to handle the “real” world. It’s extremely insulting, and for all the popularity of games like WoW and Second Life it’s a stigma that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. I play video games because they’re fun, and I enjoy the _GAME_, not because I need to assume another identity or to escape into another persona. That’s fucking ridiculous. The people I play WoW with are just a bunch of dudes playing a video game trying to “own” people, end of story.

  6. There’s no news story that can’t be improved by throwing in an unrelated but bizarre online relationship.

  7. “The people I play WoW with are just a bunch of dudes playing a video game trying to “own” people, end of story.”

    Your circle of friends is not an accurate, scientific cross-section of the MMO playing public. There is a segment – perhaps larger than a lot of us admit – that is “addicted” to MMORPG’s because it DOES allow them to be more important, more “special” than they are in their daily life. It’s an escape from an ordinary life. When the game becomes more important than real life, which for a lot of people it eventually does, you have what many consider (the American Medical Association is in the process of deciding) a legitimate addiction. You have people neglecting work, relationships, marriages, etc… This isn’t even news, it’s common knowledge. People have actually DIED at their keyboards, or killed other players as retribution for in-game actions.

    I know the knee-jerk reaction to the mainstream media is always, “They don’t know about games so they should STFU,” but they have a perspective that gamers – who are themselves immersed in the scene/games in question – do not.

  8. Here’s the other EQ related quote from the article:

    “And you have groups of four people that go out on different missions and whatever, and you slay dragons. You know, you have lots of fun,” explains Jennifer’s mother Narda. ‘And it was escape for Jen.’ ”

    My problem here is with the last line. The couldn’t leave it at “You know, you have lots of fun”, they had to add “And it was an escape for Jen”. How does her mom know that? I’m not saying that there aren’t people with a MMO “problem”, but every time MMOs are mentioned in the media, there is an assumption that the person playing them has a mental defect in some way. I’m saying that they read too much into it, and that for me, the games are an escape in the same way that TV, reading, and Mario Kart are an escape. How is anything that you do for fun not an escape?

    When WoW was first released, I probably played at least 40+ hours a week. It was all my friends and I did. Why? Was I escaping my shitty life? I dunno, I kind of like my life. Just because something is so fun that you want to spend all your time doing it doesn’t mean that you life is broken in some way. It’s my free time to spend how I want, and I’m a little tired of being vilified for it.

  9. If she had only picked a barbarian to play instead of a high elf she might still be alive today! No one cybered barbarians in EQ.

  10. “If she had only picked a barbarian to play instead of a high elf she might still be alive today! No one cybered barbarians in EQ.”

    Sick. But I laughed.

  11. TV, reading, and Mario Kart are an escape.

    As an aspiring racecar driver who had his career cut short by a horrible accident I use my Mario Kart races to relive the rush of victory once more

  12. I still say FPS’s take more skill then MMORPG’s. The only MMO games I like is stuff like the action type rpg’s. Like the slashers and such.

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