Do You Believe in Happily Ever After for Gamers?

With today’s fast pace on technology, there are a lot of entertainment for everyone, especially for gamers that are now being invented and released to the public. One of them is the MMORPGs or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games that supports thousands or millions of players online around the globe. The addiction on MMORPGs for teenagers and young adults are unexplainable for others who can’t relate to the excitement and fun the games gave to its players. Well, the games are addictive because of its leveling game play and costume/fashion additions, but there’s one feature everyone loves – the wedding/snuggling one. Players, especially if you got a match of a REAL girl and a REAL boy, enjoy the wedding feature when they have the chance to find someone in the game that’s willing to have a relationship online. It’s happening all the time now around all the social networking sites and online games, but does Online Love Affairs could end seriously in what players call IRL or In Real Life?

In some situations, Online Love Affairs or O.L.F. would end the same way they started, through the internet only, or online, and would never reach another level called reality. Maybe because some people wouldn’t take this sort of relationship seriously, especially that it started only in a game. But then, there are rare situations where fate takes a funny little turn and the gamers who had affairs online brought it out to the real world. Take Aya and Andrew (ages 19 and 21) for example, they met on the MMORPG called Perfect World and became boyfriends online. They chatted through Yahoo Messenger, saw each other on Friendster and finally met in Aya’s hometown. Andrew actually lives in another city, miles and miles away from Aya’s place, but it didn’t stop them from meeting each other. After they met, their relationship, which started on the online game grew deeper and soon Andrew kept coming back to meet her and her family. Unfortunately, Aya became pregnant earlier than they were expecting but Andrew didn’t run away from his responsibility. They soon got married and are now living a great life together. They both said that they didn’t regret anything, especially their wonderful son, or meeting and making their online affair a real one.

Just like Aya and Andrew, Michelle and Richard (22 and 25 years old) met in an online game, though their story is quite different. Michelle is a single mom and working as a home-based researcher while Richard is a Wed Developer, they never thought of meeting in person until they actually saw and recognized each other in a mall in their city. After their first meet up, Richard had been visiting Michelle in their house with her daughter every after working hour. They became engaged after a year and got married (Michelle wasn’t married to her daughter’s father), just like their characters in the game World of Warcraft that they were playing. Soon enough, they had their son, Michael, and up to now, both of them are still playing the game where they met.

There are still a lot of similar stories yet to be told among the gamers, and who would have thought that online affairs can get serious? Maybe it depends on the mind sets of a couple, or the decision they make. It’s amazing to realize that though something started in a game, it doesn’t have to end like a game. Couples ended well, married and stable, after meeting in a rather “childish” manner. Just because they took a risky turn from online into actually knowing each other personally. So next time you play a game in the internet, you will never know, you might actually meet the person you’ll be with someday, and for the rest of your life.

Photos courtesy of: Aileen Mapanao

IGN: Aya~Ninna (Perfect World, Exiled Clan)

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