Someone once asked me what it is like to be beautiful. I replied to my mom that no one else besides her thinks I’m attractive. Throughout this lesson, we are told that physical attractiveness is one of the key components to relationship. In fact, it may be the most important factor in initial mating choice. However, I felt it was important to look at this from a different perspective. This is an online class, so perhaps we could add a little online flair to things.
MMORPG’s, or massive multiplayer online role playing games have become increasingly popular over the years. In fact they are so popular that there are now tournaments in which players compete for millions of dollars in real life. If teenage me could have predicted this, I wouldn’t have listened to my mother; rather I think I would study less and play more. But one of the more interesting aspects of these games is the role playing aspect. No, I don’t mean like pretending to be a family in game or some other such weird nonsense (although I have seen such tomfoolery). I mean the general building of relationships that are built through playing as a certain character. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to make friends with someone all the way across the world, knowing that the only thing you have in common might be this one passion. I feel it is reminiscent of the days when people would get on their ham radios just trying to make a little conversation with a stranger. There is a certain fondness and connection that can be built from these online relationships, even though you can’t exactly see the other person.
One study aimed to look at just how exactly online relationships function. Coulson et al. (2018) found that although physical attraction was certainly a factor in terms of predicting levels of attachment through online relationships, social attraction and task attraction were better indicators of how secure their attachment was. In fact, people tended to rate their online friends as less attractive than their real life friends, even though they spent more time with and communicated more with their online friends (Coulson et al., 2018).
So perhaps in this new age of technology, some of the rules are flying out of the book. As for why people tend to prefer online relationships with people who may be less attractive, the question is anyone’s guess. Perhaps because they are not constantly looking at their friends when they are socializing, they don’t associate their physical attractiveness with how highly they each other. Perhaps social attraction is more important because people have to make up for the fact that there is no physicality to be impressed with, so they push to be more social in order to form bonds. And in terms of task attraction, it makes sense that people will prefer friends who are good at the game, as opposed to players who can’t do much to help themselves let alone others.
Maybe physical attraction is on the way out. Maybe online friendships are on the rise. There are a lot of factors at play here, but it seems that there is a constant in all these things. For people that play online games, physical attraction is not the most important factor. On the contrary, social and gaming skill seem to the preferred traits. Maybe it is our time, the time for the ugly barnacles to thrive.
References:
Coulson, M. C., Oskis, A., Meredith, J., & Gould, R. L. (2018). Attachment, attraction and communication in real and virtual worlds: A study of massively multiplayer online gamers. Computers in Human Behavior, 87, 49-57. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2018.05.017