Affairs with an avatar; silly Game or Cheat?

Affair with an avatar: Silly game or real cheat?
By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 8:41 a.m. ET March 13, 2008


Q: I am curious what you think about Web sites such as Second Life, where people log in to have “in world” (admin: please watch your word). Do you think that the anonymity of the computer has had an effect on our sexuality as a nation? Has it propagated a culture of adultery and ecstasy?
A: Adultery and ecstasy? Are the two synonymous? Geez, don’t let that get around.

Virtual online worlds have not propagated a culture of adultery. That’s been around for several thousand years. And not everybody logs in to have (admin: please watch your word). Far from it.

Still, virtual worlds have enabled people to explore in new ways. In an online virtual world, we can be whoever and whatever we want to be. We can try on personas. The demure woman you often see shopping for lentils in real life could become a slutty barfly. Or a man. Or a man-wolf.

Research done at Stanford University by Jeremy Bailenson and Nicholas Yee for a 2007 report on “The Proteus Effect” (Proteus being a mutable shape-shifter among the ancient Greek gods) showed that “across different behavioral measures and different representational manipulations, we observed the effect of an altered self-representation on behavior. Participants who had more attractive avatars exhibited increased self-disclosure and were more willing to approach opposite-gendered strangers after less than one minute of exposure to their altered avatar. In other words, the attractiveness of their avatars impacted how intimate participants were willing to be with a stranger.”

In cyberspace, you can be hot and confident and do things you may never do in real life. How you use that sizzle can be good or bad. If you use it to establish intimacies, to give up your anonymity and share secrets about your real life that you would never tell your spouse, that could be as much, if not more so, of a betrayal than putting your avatar in some goofy sexual situation.

Whether a virtual affair really is cheating is more up to the rules you have established with your partner, it seems to me. In last year's MSNBC.com/iVillage Lust, Love & Loyalty survey, two-thirds of respondents said they consider engaging in online (admin: please watch your word) talk or sexual Webcamming to be cheating. Not everyone agrees, so if your partner thinks virtual world (admin: please watch your word) is cheating, then it is. If he or she believes visiting, say, the LoveChess site so you can look at avatar (admin: please watch your word) from other sites or play chess as a naked, horny ancient Egyptian (giving new meaning to the phrase "thinks five moves ahead"), is copasetic, then have at it.

Which means you ought to talk about virtual worlds like Second Life, There, Entropia or role-playing games like World of Warcraft (not all of which permit (admin: please watch your word)). While there is a lot of (admin: please watch your word) in some virtual worlds, it's not always of the illicit variety. In another study, Yee — who was not necessarily studying (admin: please watch your word), but virtual-gaming realms — found that nearly 60 percent of 311 women surveyed entered the virtual world with their real-life romantic partner. “Open-ended responses from these users indicate that their online relationships shape, influence and allow them to explore their material world relationships,” he wrote.

In other words, though the potential downsides are obvious — online affairs turning into real-life ones, cheating with avatars and ignoring your spouse — and well-publicized, we might also use such virtual worlds to gain insight into our significant others. Wouldn’t it be interesting to walk into a virtual (admin: please watch your word) shop or meet a virtual sexy stranger with your husband or wife and find out in a safe and anonymous way what he or she finds exciting, or to turn your partner into the opposite (admin: please watch your word) and see how he or she would behave?

hahahaha this ----> (admin: please watch your word). <---- sentence made confusion well let me explain first about this one this text was only means about (s3x) it was only forbiden to say thats why it showns like that
but no worries it has already been change to this ---> s**

and about the topic what he was telling on second life here was about only love affairs, whether its a fantasy world or cyber means only

thanks for sharing this info