Click me (Applegeeks.com cartoon)
A “marriages” between characters a common MMORPG occurence, or more urban myth used as forum joke material?
Tell me your experiences, you MMORPG people, because the last time I was close to such a thing it was in the text-based MUD days and even then the only marriage I saw was one done as spoof.
They’re unfortunately real. I’ve seen quite a few in Everquest, even saw one in Puzzle Pirates.
Depends on the game. EQ seemed to have zillions as did UO. DAOC, while there are provisions for them in-game, seems to have very few but then again I’ve only played on three or four servers.
They haven’t allowed for it in the US yet, but FFXI has a whole procedure for marriages… you have to spend literally months planning them, you have to get someone to perform the ceremony, you get special wedding “armor,” etc. It’s insanity, distilled.
my wife and i married our DAoC characters a few months before our real wedding. it was silly, there isn’t any in-game representation of it after the fact that i could see.
come to think of it, i don’t think we’re even playing those 2 characters any more.
It’s very real. Sometimes it’s two people looking for something to signify and strengthen their relationship. Usually, it’s one person who thinks it’s a good idea and another who’s alone for the ride. Just like real life.
To this day, there’s a person who’s never really forgiven me for not marrying her character in EQ.
They’re the real deal, sadly. Attended one in the MUD Realms of Arkania in 1995. At that point, I had an epiphany. I thought, “I don’t attend the weddings of my friends in real life, what am I doing?” Walked away from the MOG scene at that point and never looked back until I was wooed back in by the Lotus of Righteous Enlightenment about a month ago.
Oh they happen.
I remember they happened EXTREMELY frequently on “The Realm,” Sierra’s old MMO. Like, one a day. It was bad.
Second place was Everquest. Lots of them there too.
If you run an MMOG and don’t sell at least a rudimentary marriage service, it is just money left on the table. All a game has to provide is some simple flower generating tool for the GMs and a ring of some sort. Then charge $19.99 and ring the register.
When I was playing a cook in SW:G, someone asked me to cater their wedding. At the time, I didn’t even have a factory, so there was no way I was going to try to carry that much food around without crates. Then the more I thought about it, how the hell would I even cater a wedding, anyway? It’s not like the game supports buffet tables. Then I realized that the whole thing was stupid, anyway, and I went back to my true in-game goal of killing things with my bare hands while high on spice.
Weddings are boring. Real or in-game. They also suck. They suck so much that people that don’t like them complain how they happen all the time. If that’s so, somebody likes them…
I don’t see why non-roleplayers would even be interested in such things but they are. For roleplayers the value of this kind of ceremony varies. You’ve got some who really are living a kind of ‘second life’ in the game and roleplaying is for them essentially translating RL analogues into the game world. Getting hitched is one of those things that interests them. IC roleplayers, more interested in characters on their own terms rather than as alterego, tend to be more interested in the politics, even the social dynamics, of a wedding than the romantic implications. Who’s standing with who and what that might mean.
Most weddings I’ve attended have been on text-based MUSHes. Generally it was all political. About seeing and overhearing gossip and tidbits about events or individuals that might be useful in some way. More often than not I’d be AFK for most of it and doing stuff in other games or IRL. Checking in only to read up on what people were whispering to each other in the pews or to make sure no ‘surprises’ had come up like party crashers or other dramatic developments.
I even had a character get married once and it was fun only in that I played it much as he would have. Absolutely no planning whatsoever and making everything up on the fly. A disorganized and chaotic mess pulled together only by our protagonist’s steely determination and ability to fast-talk others into believing he had everything well in hand. Bloody mess but it was hilarious for me at least.
MMORPG weddings seem to be much more like conventional modern weddings than anything really evocative or roleplay worthy. Certain players love them though. I had to sleepwalk through one as a player I liked a great deal was organizing and choreographing it. “Walk here, stand there, wait for this then turn and…” They made my gritty, grouchy, space captain wear a tuxedo? Still I hung in there and had some fun by making entirely unappropriate asides to the groomsmen equally browbeaten into line. All in all, made for some nice screenshots but nothing I ever did or would want to do again.
One of my age-old online-gamer stories falls out of an experience I had on a MUD I was playing.
You see, on a MUD, we had online play like MMOs do today, but the only graphical representation was potentially an ASCII or (gasp) ANSI drawing or two here and there. Forget sound representation beyond sending a Ctrl-G to your comrades’ computers when they weren’t looking and making their systems beep embarrassingly.
To get to my story: I took part as the best man in an online wedding between two MUD characters. It would have been all sorts of hokey, until it was suggested that the bride walk down the aisle to accompanyment.
The ensuing screen of text looked something like:
Vampyr: Plonk
Telsin: Plook
Vampyr: Plonk
Telsin: Plook
Cephas: Tweeeet
Vampyr: Plonk
Telsin: Plook
Vampyr: Plonk
Telsin: Plook
Cephas: Tweeeet
…and so on.
After the ceremony, the whole wedding party quickly disintegrated into a deluge of backstabbings and PKing, so in retrospect: A good time was had by all.
I remember one of the weddings that happened within our UO guild on the SP server. We told the person being married quite often that we were sure the “lady” was actually a guy. He thought we were just joking with him, until we got a teamspeak server a few weeks later. Needless to say, he was quite embarassed. :P
Also, some of the red members in the guild had stealthed into town to partake in the ceremony. Unfortunately, our guild leader had the word “guardsmen” in his speech and the NPC’s thought he was calling for the guards at the time. So there were several corpses laying about the floor during the ceremony.
Some people… some people are just sad.
A Tale In The Desert (indie MMORPG) has marriages as one of the “tests of Worship”. The test is finding another player whom you trust completely (in game terms): couples can use each others’ equipment, buildings, etc. It is an actual in-game mechanic designed from day one.
Ceremony of various kinds is assumed by certain types of players as necessary to maintain a sense of immersion. Problem is, hell is other people, and it only takes a little lack of commitment, or one party crasher, to fuck up the program.
In fact, it was one such ceremony on an early PernMUSH, of a dragon egg hatching, that is believed to have been the origin of the word “spam” being used to describe loads of unwanted and/or repetitive noise suddenly appearing in an Internet medium.
One guy I used to know was a counselor in UO (you can tell how old this story is) and told me a story of when he was shanghaied into appearing at a player wedding, smurf suit and all. Besides the “bride” going linkdead various times, the groom’s guests included members of his player-killer guild. At the end of the ceremony, they set off various spells for makeshift fireworks. Problem was, they had all their spell macros bound with PK trash talk, so wedded bliss was punctuated by shouts of “U LOSE NOOB” and “HAHA YOU DIE!”
He called the story “Why Do Dewdz Fall In Love?”
For those who don’t know, PernMUSH isn’t just any MUSH. It’s largely the grandfather of all the serious roleplaying MUSHes and many of its players have gone on to found their own or work in other internet or entertainment related professions. Guys I considered jaded dinos on AmberMUSH were wee green newbies back on PernMUSH in the day as were many of the wizards there. Much code, and many bits of jargon, that originated on PernMUSH are still in the MUSH community today.
Any of you who went through the weddings: was there an in-game honeymooon thereafter? I always sorta wondered that…
I saw a writeup of a DAoC wedding that included pictures from the honeymoon.
I saw a writeup of a DAoC wedding that included pictures from the honeymoon.[/quote]
Him: /kiss
Her: /blush
Her: /bow /bow /bow
Him: /bang /bang /bang
Both: /hug
Something like that?
