How long-distance couples use digital games to facilitate intimacy (2025)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
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.
Adding onto this, I feel like the child/children from a marriage like this also get mixed signals from their parents on what they should value in things like this. So firstly it confuses them and secondly, if they pick a side of any of their parent then they would feel like the other parent doesn't get them which might make them feel bad.
For a good marriage/parentalhood imo, there should be a common layer of value stack ie. bedrock of shared values and trust in a relationship. Disagreements can occur but with the idea of we are more similar than different. Maybe Video games help in either checking that or measuring that. I am not sure if competitive games better reflect it than relaxed games but honestly I feel like if you are already into a relationship and say video games don't work, then you also adapt to the other person values.
This exact difference exists between my wife and I. For example, when her car needed a replacement part, she enlisted her dad in an effort to find the cheapest part on eBay, attempt to replace it themselves, and then shop around for the cheapest mechanic to install the part they bought. When my car needed a part replaced, I took it to the dealership where I bought it. I figured they'd have the part on hand and know how to do it right. They would overcharge, but not a criminal amount.
We've come to an understanding: I like to use money to reduce stress. She likes to save money because it gives her a feeling of accomplishment. Not very different from hobbies.
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.
Obviously there's still the narrow margin of "living in the same place at the same time", but that margin is much wider than "be in this exact game server at this exact time of day on this exact day".
My friend got promoted and wanted to celebrate by going to a bar. His peer/colleague was also invited, and she had been hit by a bus only days before, totaling her car, but she wanted to come and convinced her neighbor to drive her to the bar. I came late, and sat far from my friend, as he invited several people, and the seats near him were taken. My friends colleagues neighbor was also at the end because she is shy and wasn't going to get into the main convo. She was cute, but I wasnt trying to pick her up, mostly just pity-chatted with her since she was clearly uncomfortable being there. And it turns out we really enjoyed chatting with each other. We meshed so well in fact, that we ended up marrying later. Obviously I skipped detail, but a lot happened for us to meet, and the window was tiny.
What if I or the peer had been busy, or my friend didn't get the promotion, or the peer's car hadn't been totaled? Or my wife, who didn't drink, had refused to go to the bar?
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 did indeed fall in love with the sound of her voice, and if it had been a malicious ruse or "catfishing" I would've been crushed. But, having been an Internet user since 1989, I like to think I'm fairly savvy. I mean, some of the "hot girls" I had interacted with turned out to be fat, smelly dudes, but they never really surprised me!
Eventually, I bowed out when I realized that the game had become quite solitary for me, grinding out solo puzzles every day without really socializing anymore.
But at that time, 20 years ago, I was holed-up in my little apartment and not socializing much, due to the broken leg injury, the extreme heat, and poverty. So, in many ways, this MMOG helped to socialize me and kept me sane, at that critical juncture in life.
Since then, I've managed to adapt better, socially, to real life, and I can get out and interact with real people on most days of the week, so that's a big win.
And my ex-fiancée did find the man of her dreams, after all, and it seems that she got what she wanted out of the experience as well. No regrets!
Puzzle Pirates was a very big part of my growing up. One of the first online games I had the pleasure of playing. I still download and check in every few years :)
Yar har har!
- 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.”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.
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.
Behind every virtual "thirst trap" is some dude in another country hoping to scam some sucker out of money.
EDIT: oh and to be clear, I've no issues with meeting folks online. I met my spouse online a couple decades ago, and we quickly moved it offline.
I also know folks (guys) who run hobbyist setups that stream on platforms and pretend to be attractive young ladies. The voice quality is very believable, and the video is approaching realistic. With a bit of doctoring, it looks completely believable...and we are talking about the widely available stuff, NOT the stuff available behind closed doors.
What I am trying to say here is don't treat a relationship as real until you meet the person in real life and build an actual connection.
I keep a voice button bound to toggle on and off all comms, also known as a "clutch key", and usually in these scenarios I keep comms off quite a bit because there is a lot of non-game chatter and I tend to only talk during freeze time - since outbound voice still works for call outs. I'm just really bad at listening to people while I am trying to focus and it frustrates me to die because of lack of game sound awareness. So, I don't know if these are the same games where people are trying to beg for skins, etc.
It is quality time in a reduced quality world.
After we both got jobs and bought a house, we decided to get Elder Scrolls Online to have an online game to play together while physically sitting next to each other. It was an obvious choice since we're both big elder scrolls fans. It was a wonderful experience and really echoed the way we met in a beautiful way.
Me and my wife started with distance, but we started craving being close within just a few months. We were lucky enough we were able to start living together within 1 year.
As of right now (15 years later), I cannot handle it. After having kids I realized I am a person who heavily need physical contact, I cannot manage a ldr I suspect (nor I want to)
1. Easy to learn and understand 2. Easy to buy and relatively inexpensive?
My go-to for simple cooperative activity is jigsaw puzzles. Just go at your own pace and enjoy.
The easier coop ones on BGA I found were: Hanabi, the Crew, Forbidden Island. The coop ones that I found outside of coop games were Pandemic and Flash Point.
Uh, skribbl.io is definitely not a Scrabble clone lol (And also not really a 1v1 game)