On a July afternoon, as the temperature creeps toward 118 degrees in a quiet suburb east of Phoenix, Ric Hoogestraat sits at his computer with the blinds drawn, smoking a cigarette. While his wife, Sue, watches television in the living room, Mr. Hoogestraat chats online with what appears on the screen to be a tall, slim redhead.
He's never met the woman outside of the computer world of Second Life, a well-chronicled digital fantasyland with more than eight million registered "residents" who get jobs, attend concerts and date other users. He's never so much as spoken to her on the telephone. But their relationship has taken on curiously real dimensions. They own two dogs, pay a mortgage together and spend hours shopping at the mall and taking long motorcycle rides. This May, when Mr. Hoogestraat, 53, needed real-life surgery, the redhead cheered him up with a private island that cost her $120,000 in the virtual world's currency, or about $480 in real-world dollars. Their bond is so strong that three months ago, Mr. Hoogestraat asked Janet Spielman, the 38-year-old Canadian woman who controls the redhead, to become his virtual wife.
The woman he's legally wed to is not amused. "It's really devastating," says Sue Hoogestraat, 58, an export agent for a shipping company, who has been married to Mr. Hoogestraat for seven months. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."
Mr. Hoogestraat plays down his online relationship, assuring his wife that it's only a game. With some 30 million people now involved world-wide, there is mounting concern that some are squandering, even damaging their real lives by obsessing over their "second" ones. That's always been a concern with videogames, but a field of study suggests that the boundary between virtual worlds and reality may be more porous than experts previously imagined.
Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers conducted by Stanford University. More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world which was published in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press's journalPresence.
"There's a fuzziness that's emerging between the virtual world and the real world," says Edward Castronova, Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Weekends As 'Dutch'
A former college computer graphics teacher, Mr. Hoogestraat was never much of a game enthusiast before he discovered Second Life. But since February, he's been spending six hours a night and often 14 hours at a stretch on weekends as Dutch Hoorenbeek, his six-foot-nine, muscular, motorcycle-riding cyber-self. The character looks like a younger, physically enhanced version of him: a biker with a long black ponytail, strong jaw and thick handlebar mustache.
"Here, you're in total control," he says, moving his avatar through the mall using the arrow keys on his keyboard.
Virtual worlds like Second Life have fast become a testing ground for the limits of relationships, both online and off. In the game, cyber sex, marriage and divorce are common. Avatars have sued one another, as well as the site's parent company, Linden Lab, in real-life courts for in-game grievances such as copyright infringement and property disputes. A typical "gamer" spends 20 to 40 hours a week in a virtual world.
Academics have only recently begun to intensively study the social dynamics of virtual worlds, but some say they are astonished by how closely virtual relationships mirror real life. "People respond to interactive technology on social and emotional levels much more than we ever thought," says Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University. "People feel bad when something bad happens to their avatar, and they feel quite good when something good happens."
On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships, recent studies suggest.
Before discovering Second Life, Mr. Hoogestraat had bounced between places and jobs, working as an elementary schoolteacher and a ski instructor, teaching computer graphics and spending two years on the road selling herbs and essential oils at Renaissance fairs. Along the way, he picked up a bachelor's degree in education from Arizona State University and took graduate courses in education and instructional technology at the University of Wyoming and the University of Arizona. He currently works as a call-center operator for Vangent Inc., a large corporation that outsources calls for the government and private companies. He makes $14 an hour.
Mr. Hoogestraat learned about Second Life in February, while watching a morning news segment. His mother had just been hospitalized with pancreatic cancer -- she died two weeks later -- and he wanted a distraction. He was fascinated by the virtual world's free-wheeling, Vegas-like atmosphere. He upgraded his avatar, buying defined stomach muscles, a furry chest and special hair that sways when he walks. Other, missing anatomy was also available for purchase. Before long, Mr. Hoogestraat was spending most nights and weekends acting out his avatar's life.
When Mr. Hoogestraat was diagnosed with diabetes and a failing gall bladder a few months ago, he was home-bound for five weeks. Some days, he played from a quarter to six in the morning until two in the morning, eating in front of the computer and pausing only for bathroom breaks.
During one marathon session, Mr. Hoogestraat met Tenaj (Janet spelled backward) while shopping. They became fast friends, then partners.
A week later, he asked her to move into the small apartment he rented in Phantom Island, an area of Second Life. In May, they married in a small ceremony in a garden overlooking a pond. She wore a strapless white dress that she bought at a Second Life yard sale and he wore a tuxedo. Thirty of their avatar friends attended.
"There's a huge trust between us," says Ms. Spielman, a divorced mother of two who works in office sales in Calgary, Alberta, and began logging on to Second Life in January. "We'll tell each other everything."
That intimacy hasn't spilled into real life. They never speak and have no plans to meet. Aside from the details they share over Second Life instant messages, each knows little about the other beyond what's posted on their brief online user profiles.
Mr. Hoogestraat's real-life wife is losing patience with her husband's second life. "It's sad; it's a waste of human life," says Mrs. Hoogestraat, who is dark-haired and heavy-set with smooth, pale skin. "Everybody has their hobbies, but when it's from six in the morning until two in the morning, that's not a hobby, that's your life."
The real Mrs. Hoogestraat is no stranger to online communities -- she met her husband in a computer chat room three years ago. Both were divorced and had adult children from previous marriages, and Mrs. Hoogestraat says she was relieved to find someone educated and adventurous after years of failed relationships. Now, as she pays household bills, cooks, does laundry, takes care of their three dogs and empties ashtrays around the house while her husband spends hours designing outfits for virtual strippers and creating labels for virtual coffee cups, she wonders what happened to the person she married.
Just a Game
One Saturday night in early June, she discovered his cyber wife. He called her over to the computer to show her an outfit he had designed. There, above the image of the redheaded model, it said "Mrs. Hoorenbeek." When she confronted him, he huffily replied that it was just a game.
Two weeks later, Mrs. Hoogestraat joined an online support group for spouses of obsessive online gamers called EverQuest Widows, named after another popular online fantasy game that players call Evercrack.
"It's avalanched beyond repair," says Sharra Goddard, 30, Mrs. Hoogestraat's daughter and a sign-language interpreter in Chandler, Ariz. She says she and her two brothers have offered to help their mother move out of the house.
Mrs. Hoogestraat says she's not ready to separate. "I'm not a monster; I can see how it fulfills parts of his life that he can no longer do because of physical limitations, because of his age. His avatar, it's him at 25," she says. "He's a good person. He's just fallen down this rabbit hole."
Mr. Hoogestraat, for his part, doesn't feel he's being unfaithful. "She watches TV, and I do this," he says. "I tried to get her involved so we could play together, but she wasn't interested."
Family-law experts and marital counselors say they're seeing a growing number of marriages dissolve over virtual infidelity. Cyber affairs don't legally count as adultery unless they cross over into the real world, but they may be cited as grounds for divorce and could be a factor in determining alimony and child custody in some states, according to several legal experts, including Jeff Atkinson, professor at the DePaul University College of Law and author of the American Bar Association's "Guide to Marriage, Divorce and Families."
This past June, the American Medical Association called for more psychiatric research on excessive gaming, but backed away from classifying videogame addiction as a formal disorder.
Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? - WSJ.com
He's never met the woman outside of the computer world of Second Life, a well-chronicled digital fantasyland with more than eight million registered "residents" who get jobs, attend concerts and date other users. He's never so much as spoken to her on the telephone. But their relationship has taken on curiously real dimensions. They own two dogs, pay a mortgage together and spend hours shopping at the mall and taking long motorcycle rides. This May, when Mr. Hoogestraat, 53, needed real-life surgery, the redhead cheered him up with a private island that cost her $120,000 in the virtual world's currency, or about $480 in real-world dollars. Their bond is so strong that three months ago, Mr. Hoogestraat asked Janet Spielman, the 38-year-old Canadian woman who controls the redhead, to become his virtual wife.
The woman he's legally wed to is not amused. "It's really devastating," says Sue Hoogestraat, 58, an export agent for a shipping company, who has been married to Mr. Hoogestraat for seven months. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."
Mr. Hoogestraat plays down his online relationship, assuring his wife that it's only a game. With some 30 million people now involved world-wide, there is mounting concern that some are squandering, even damaging their real lives by obsessing over their "second" ones. That's always been a concern with videogames, but a field of study suggests that the boundary between virtual worlds and reality may be more porous than experts previously imagined.
Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers conducted by Stanford University. More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world which was published in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press's journalPresence.
"There's a fuzziness that's emerging between the virtual world and the real world," says Edward Castronova, Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Weekends As 'Dutch'
A former college computer graphics teacher, Mr. Hoogestraat was never much of a game enthusiast before he discovered Second Life. But since February, he's been spending six hours a night and often 14 hours at a stretch on weekends as Dutch Hoorenbeek, his six-foot-nine, muscular, motorcycle-riding cyber-self. The character looks like a younger, physically enhanced version of him: a biker with a long black ponytail, strong jaw and thick handlebar mustache.
"Here, you're in total control," he says, moving his avatar through the mall using the arrow keys on his keyboard.
Virtual worlds like Second Life have fast become a testing ground for the limits of relationships, both online and off. In the game, cyber sex, marriage and divorce are common. Avatars have sued one another, as well as the site's parent company, Linden Lab, in real-life courts for in-game grievances such as copyright infringement and property disputes. A typical "gamer" spends 20 to 40 hours a week in a virtual world.
Academics have only recently begun to intensively study the social dynamics of virtual worlds, but some say they are astonished by how closely virtual relationships mirror real life. "People respond to interactive technology on social and emotional levels much more than we ever thought," says Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University. "People feel bad when something bad happens to their avatar, and they feel quite good when something good happens."
On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships, recent studies suggest.
Before discovering Second Life, Mr. Hoogestraat had bounced between places and jobs, working as an elementary schoolteacher and a ski instructor, teaching computer graphics and spending two years on the road selling herbs and essential oils at Renaissance fairs. Along the way, he picked up a bachelor's degree in education from Arizona State University and took graduate courses in education and instructional technology at the University of Wyoming and the University of Arizona. He currently works as a call-center operator for Vangent Inc., a large corporation that outsources calls for the government and private companies. He makes $14 an hour.
Mr. Hoogestraat learned about Second Life in February, while watching a morning news segment. His mother had just been hospitalized with pancreatic cancer -- she died two weeks later -- and he wanted a distraction. He was fascinated by the virtual world's free-wheeling, Vegas-like atmosphere. He upgraded his avatar, buying defined stomach muscles, a furry chest and special hair that sways when he walks. Other, missing anatomy was also available for purchase. Before long, Mr. Hoogestraat was spending most nights and weekends acting out his avatar's life.
When Mr. Hoogestraat was diagnosed with diabetes and a failing gall bladder a few months ago, he was home-bound for five weeks. Some days, he played from a quarter to six in the morning until two in the morning, eating in front of the computer and pausing only for bathroom breaks.
During one marathon session, Mr. Hoogestraat met Tenaj (Janet spelled backward) while shopping. They became fast friends, then partners.
A week later, he asked her to move into the small apartment he rented in Phantom Island, an area of Second Life. In May, they married in a small ceremony in a garden overlooking a pond. She wore a strapless white dress that she bought at a Second Life yard sale and he wore a tuxedo. Thirty of their avatar friends attended.
"There's a huge trust between us," says Ms. Spielman, a divorced mother of two who works in office sales in Calgary, Alberta, and began logging on to Second Life in January. "We'll tell each other everything."
That intimacy hasn't spilled into real life. They never speak and have no plans to meet. Aside from the details they share over Second Life instant messages, each knows little about the other beyond what's posted on their brief online user profiles.
Mr. Hoogestraat's real-life wife is losing patience with her husband's second life. "It's sad; it's a waste of human life," says Mrs. Hoogestraat, who is dark-haired and heavy-set with smooth, pale skin. "Everybody has their hobbies, but when it's from six in the morning until two in the morning, that's not a hobby, that's your life."
The real Mrs. Hoogestraat is no stranger to online communities -- she met her husband in a computer chat room three years ago. Both were divorced and had adult children from previous marriages, and Mrs. Hoogestraat says she was relieved to find someone educated and adventurous after years of failed relationships. Now, as she pays household bills, cooks, does laundry, takes care of their three dogs and empties ashtrays around the house while her husband spends hours designing outfits for virtual strippers and creating labels for virtual coffee cups, she wonders what happened to the person she married.
Just a Game
One Saturday night in early June, she discovered his cyber wife. He called her over to the computer to show her an outfit he had designed. There, above the image of the redheaded model, it said "Mrs. Hoorenbeek." When she confronted him, he huffily replied that it was just a game.
Two weeks later, Mrs. Hoogestraat joined an online support group for spouses of obsessive online gamers called EverQuest Widows, named after another popular online fantasy game that players call Evercrack.
"It's avalanched beyond repair," says Sharra Goddard, 30, Mrs. Hoogestraat's daughter and a sign-language interpreter in Chandler, Ariz. She says she and her two brothers have offered to help their mother move out of the house.
Mrs. Hoogestraat says she's not ready to separate. "I'm not a monster; I can see how it fulfills parts of his life that he can no longer do because of physical limitations, because of his age. His avatar, it's him at 25," she says. "He's a good person. He's just fallen down this rabbit hole."
Mr. Hoogestraat, for his part, doesn't feel he's being unfaithful. "She watches TV, and I do this," he says. "I tried to get her involved so we could play together, but she wasn't interested."
Family-law experts and marital counselors say they're seeing a growing number of marriages dissolve over virtual infidelity. Cyber affairs don't legally count as adultery unless they cross over into the real world, but they may be cited as grounds for divorce and could be a factor in determining alimony and child custody in some states, according to several legal experts, including Jeff Atkinson, professor at the DePaul University College of Law and author of the American Bar Association's "Guide to Marriage, Divorce and Families."
This past June, the American Medical Association called for more psychiatric research on excessive gaming, but backed away from classifying videogame addiction as a formal disorder.
Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? - WSJ.com
