How MMORPGs Help Relationships Flourish

I know, cheesy title. Frankly I can’t think of any title for this particular post that’s less cheesy. It’s either the one above or “How MMORPGs Kept My Marriage Alive.” See what I mean?

Okay, enough of the cheese. It’s time to get down to serious business. First off, though, I’d like to apologize for not posting anything in the past couple of days. The wife and baby are down with the flu (not H1N1 or what is more popularly known as the swine flu, thank the gaming gods), and it’s taking a lot of effort to keep order in an otherwise chaotic home.

Going back to the topic, yes, I’m here to talk about how massively multiplayer online games affected, positively, of course, my relationship with the commander, uhmm, I mean, the wife.

Now, before I continue, let me clarify that I did not meet my wife in some MMORPG. We met through other means that shall remain undisclosed. It’s just that ever since I introduced her to the world of MMOs, she never let go.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way … our affair started way back in 2003, when I shoved her into my world, Rune Midgard, the mythical place spawned by the hit MMORPG Ragnarok Online.

Joyce, the commander, wasn’t really into video games—unless you consider Free Cell and Solitaire real, ehem, video games. So her introduction and eventual assimilation into mainstream MMORPG could be considered a leap and not just a step.

Since 2005, we’ve explored nearly a dozen other MMORPGs, from Ragnarok Online to PristonTale, from Tantra to R.O.S.E. Online, from Rising Force Online to Fly For Fun, from Silkroad Online to Perfect World … and the list goes on.

But it was only in Perfect World that we discovered how much MMOs have benefited us.

There was a time in our life as a family that I had to stay nearly a thousand kilometers apart from Joyce and our daughter Cesky because of work. While a lot of other couples—married or otherwise—would resort to the telephone or instant messenger to bridge the communication gap and have some semblance of a relationship, the wife and I spent most of our time “together” playing Perfect World.

Through Perfect World, we didn’t just talk, we had an entire world to explore, and we enjoyed it with friends and reveled in it without company but our own. From morning till late afternoon, I was at the office. When dusk settles, I enter Perfect World’s Pangu to be with my beloved (cheese alert!). Of course, we had to content ourselves with staring at our avatars or toons, which are so different from what we really look like. But who the hell cares when you’re having so much fun!

The online affair between husband and wife didn’t stop there. It prospered even when I moved to where they lived. We sat side by side in real life while our toons pwned mobs and bosses.

We’ve stopped playing Perfect World about two months ago, but we still play together, only in another world, the one spawned by Atlantica Online.

So my advice to guys out there, get your girlfriends, wives or, uhmm, mistresses to play video games, particularly massively multiplayer online games, with you. It’s worth the effort, and if things don’t turn out well (what I mean is, if she gives up on the idea), at the very least you’ll have another toon to play with.