Okay - I admit it - my first online MMPORPG was The Sims Online.
Granted, it doesn’t have much street cred these days and the continuous skilling and status-monitoring bordered on tedium, so it was inevitable that cybering and more flirty/social things happened there. In fact, I am the first to admit that I was instrumental in showing others how to pervert certain actions in game to obtain a more lacivious action.
However, then the heavens parted in 2004 and my friend introduced me to *World of Warcraft. * And instead of hours of painting pictures or playing pianos - I kill stuff! Umm, I mean I quest and adventure in a Middle-Earth environment and occasionally this requires the taking of lives for the betterment of my peoples. (yeah, right. I kill stuff)
So imagine my shock that after months and years of playing to still get the whispers of “Hey, are you a girl? Wanna cyber??”
No, I don’t want to cyber. I wanna kill stuff. Leave me alone!
Although, I admit - the funniest one was a level one character named Chris Hansen (i.e., tv’s host of “To Catch A Predator”).
But still - c’mon - does anyone really want to spend good money playing an enjoyable game and waste it by sitting around and cybering instead?
When I was futzing around with Second Life a couple years back, the first time I went wandering into a “den of sin” I almost peed my pants laughing so hard.
First, I couldn’t figure out why some of the “equipment” was relatively realistic, while others basically had pixilated blocks of various colors sticking out from to their avatars. Come to find out that you had to pay currency for the really nice genitalia.
Heh, I used to roleplay online message V:tM during the pay Compuserve days, and I would cyber with one of my gaming partners a lot. Years later we got together and had some of the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. So the answer is yes sometimes it’s totally worth it.
I never really understood the point of cybering at all myself. Not in MMOs, not on IRC, not on MSN. It’s the internet. There’s porn.
My favorite answer to a cybering request was a friend’s. He played a female enchanter in Everquest, back in ye olden days. Some random guy messaged him “Are you really a girl ?!”. He replied : “I can’t throw fireballs either.”
I remember that it used to be really common, if you walked down the Ironforge/Stormwind train tunnels, to find people cybering in the dark cubbyholes down there. For some reason they’d do it using /say rather than /tell, so if you were nearby you could hear them. I used to have a couple of guildmates who’d head down the tunnels and find cyberers, sit just out of sight but within /say range and join in on the sexx0rs. Boy did that piss some of them off.
There used to be an RP guild that was basically a Pimps & Hos society - that would actually roam Stormwind at night and solicit gold for cybering or erotic dancing.
One night elf used to use a Cockney accent - I remember my best friend and I would pick on her for being out of character and then scare of her prospects . . .
Maybe we should point all the people who want to cyber to the MMOs where the whole point IS to have your computer generated models bump and grind.
(Oh, yes, those exist. They’re not all that hard to find, either.
Personally I found the banner ads of Mr. Summer Sausage sliding in and out of Ms. Silicone Tits to be hilarious instead of hot, but maybe somebody’s into that kind of thing.)
After Nexon acquired Maple Story, they added the “marriage” functionality to it in which two characters of the opposite sex could become a virtual couple and be equipped with additional items and go on a special “married people only” quest. So of course everybody and their brother started harassing each other about being their in-game boyfriend/girlfriend.
At first, I tried to just brush them off or ignore them, but some people didn’t take “no” for an answer. Then I discovered the fool-proof way of making them go away:
“How much you willing to pay me? :D”
For some reason they always seemed to be really offended by the notion that I wanted fake money to be their fake girlfriend. shrug
Unfortunately, I tried to tell someone I would cyber for gold - and then they actually tried to pay me! I just couldn’t do it - there were too many things that needed slaying . . .