TruthScape.com - Relationship Issues, Dating and Sex

All of the issues I discussed in the prior topic about online friendships apply doubly when it comes to more serious relationships. And these do take place in online games: take many thousands of mostly teen players and put them where they can interact for hours at a time, and the results are inevitable. Unfortunately, online relationships are nothing like real ones, and these differences can make them very concerning.

The first issue is that most gamers (of all types) are boys; girls are a small minority. This results in female players in RuneScape being subjected to a nearly continuous bombardment of sexually-related talk and offers of relationships by the testosterone-overloaded majority of the game's players. This usually is more annoying than dangerous, but it sometimes crosses the line into harassment and should be reported accordingly.

The most usual form of RuneScape “relationship” is a male and female player deciding to be “boyfriend and girlfriend”. These relationships can be serious, but in many cases are superficial to the point of being silly. Before Jagex changed the rules to make solicitation illegal, it had be common for female players to just have random male players walk up to them and ask, “wanna be my gf?” Sometimes the boy would make a comment about the girl “looking sexy” or some such—as if the computer-generated character's visual appearance meant anything about the person!

Of course, nobody has any way of knowing who anyone is in the game. Not only can a real-life male play a female character and vice-versa, it is possible to change the sex of a character within the game! So even though I play a male character I can make myself female at will, and then change back again. There's even a quest where males have to become women temporarily!

Another issue is age: the players of RuneScape run the gamut in age from preschoolers to grandparents. Many times these “boyfriend/girlfriend” arrangements arise because a teen chats with another player and naïvely assumes that the other player is also a teen. I personally was once solicited to be the “boyfriend” of a female player who said she was 17. When I declined politely and she persisted, I told her that I was married and old enough to be her father—she was rather unhappy. (This was in my early days of playing; I don't tell people my age anymore in-game, and I don't recommend that others do it either.)

It's even more disturbing when it goes in the other direction. All the males who want “girlfriends” in RuneScape should consider that not only could they be trying to “pick up” someone the age of their grandmothers—they could be hitting on 8-year-old girls. Since the game is “officially” only for those who are 13+, younger kids routinely lie about their ages to avoid “getting in trouble”. The way someone speaks can give clues as to age, but not reliably.

Most of the time “dating” relationships in online games go nowhere, but they can occasionally get quite serious. I saw first hand on another game that I played years ago, just how obsessed players can become over other people they barely know. In some cases the sex talk can get quite serious, and it can be done in private where it cannot be seen by others; cybersex is against the rules but nobody can report what they cannot see. In the most serious cases, the “couple” may decide to meet in person, with all the dangers that entails. All of these are excellent reasons why you should not let pre-pubescent kids play RuneScape unsupervised, if you let them play at all.

Another issue is the use of relationships purely for scamming; this is not as disturbing as a child or teen developing a serious attraction to a stranger online, but it's still a problem. Just as scammers will form false friendships to try to trick their “friends” out of items, the same thing goes on with boyfriends and girlfriends. This is the RuneScape equivalent of the ages-old trick of a woman “using” a man to get gifts; once the girl has what she wants, she just puts the male on “ignore” and makes him effectively disappear. This of course can leave a young teen boy rather heartbroken.

Of course most girls (in my experience) tend to be more honest than boys, but in the online world there is the added problem that female characters aren't always female! A popular scam involves boys who create “sexy” looking female characters and practice “acting hot”. They then find boyfriends—sometimes several at once—and butter them up (see Figure 86). The boys get excited by all the attention and give gifts to their “girlfriend”—who then dumps them, laughing at their gullibility.

**Figure 86: Boyfriend Recruitment**
It used to be that you could stand in Lumbridge in any free world and find players looking for boyfriends and girlfriends. A good percentage of the ones looking for boyfriends, as here, were really boys playing female players, either for attention or just to get items. The incidence of this idiocy has, fortunately, diminished now that Jagex has made asking for boyfriends/girlfriends against the rules.

Also note all the players trying to randomly trade me to ask for items... J

Sum it all up and the answer is simple: avoid relationships in RuneScape. They are based on ignorance or deception, fraught with peril, and usually not very satisfying in any event.