Thursday, November 22, 2012

Massively Multiplayer Friendships: An Exploration of Online Raiding and the Implications on Real World Friendships

Massively Multiplayer Friendships:
An Exploration of Online Raiding and the Implications on Real World Friendships

Grant Tabler

MDST*4500 (Applied Research Project)
Section 03, Thursday 11:45

Professor Greg Kelley

November 22, 2012

We lost six of our soldiers in that last battle; we barely made it through alive. We heard this place was hell, but we didn’t expect this. The squads that came back last week were broken and battered, not a hint of optimism among them. I sit here, weapon at the ready, listening to the strategizing going on for the fight to come. We know our enemy and we’re doing our best to get a plan of action.  Beside me is Paul, he’s ex-navy and the oldest of our group at forty-three. Beside him is Jason, a police officer from South Carolina.

Our team is comprised of a pharmacist, a nurse, two students, an accountant, an office worker, a webcomic artist, a police officer, and two guys who haven’t got jobs outside of this. But right now, our jobs and our lives back home don’t matter. What matters is we are here to take down tyranny, and we are damn good at our job. Finally the time comes, we know our roles and we start our assault.  

We’re met immediately with fearsome carnage as enemies swarm us from all sides. The fighting is utter chaos as bullets fly in all directions and our training takes over. “Watch out!” we hear Tim cry as Paul gets blindsided and goes down without a fight. Richard soon follows as we’re picked off one by one. 

A collective sigh echoes through our headsets as we hear Tim say, “It’s a wipe.” In moments we’re all standing outside the area as ghosts in a nearby graveyard. Tim starts going over what needs to happen for next time and we all start the long trek back to make another attempt on the dragon we’re fighting. This is raiding in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) which caters to various pursuits, one of which is something called raiding. Raiding is the pursuit of overcoming complicated challenges and puzzles in order to defeat a powerful monster such as a dragon with a group of either ten or twenty-five people. The form involved is able to be likened to a battle or war as I’ve done above. The challenge involved requires players to strategize, work together, communicate, and use a tremendous amount of reflex, adaptation, and practice to overcome it.

I have been an active participant in MMORPG communities on a consistent basis for the last ten years. I have been re-examining and reflecting on my experiences within this online subculture based on my media studies education over the last four years. What I will recount in this paper could be considered by insiders of this subculture to be common knowledge and not even requiring of citation for this field, if indeed there were citable cases for all of this.  However, the information I intend to relate to you still has relevance to audiences that exist on the outsides of this subculture. I seek to describe, explain and analyze the digital and subcultural world of online interaction within online raiding and its implications on team dynamics, social interaction, team cohesion and inter-media transference of socialization into real life.

Much of my own experiences and knowledge, as an expert in the field of online video games, are being drawn on for this paper. Much of what I will go into detail about is not available in the scholarship already available based on my own research, therefore some portions of this paper will be without numerous citations. I assure you that this is not due to laziness in attribution, but in fact is an act of necessity due to a lack of scholarly focus on much of what I seek to bring to light. In this way, this paper seeks to add to the official established knowledgebase on the subject of gaming and subculture.

  • Subcultural Definition

The blanket term of ‘gaming’ is established as a subculture in the media studies education I have received here. However, I do not believe something so loose as ‘gaming’ per se can be considered a subculture. Ken Gelder, a noted scholar in the realm of subcultures, set out six main ways a subculture could be defined. I will now go through each of these and provide some background reasoning for why MMORPG communities fit as a subculture.

  • Through their often negative relations to work (as 'idle', 'parasitic', at play or at leisure, etc.); (Gelder i)

MMORPGs are viewed by outsiders, and even its own members as parasitic of their time and categorically ‘at play' or leisure based. This game type is a time sink; it is a game that is designed with the intent of eliminating other hobbies and obligations. This is perhaps the only genre of game which is built specifically to become the only game you ever play, and the only thing you ever do. The game’s content is constantly updated and added to and the amount of things someone with a completist spirit has available to occupy them is nigh limitless. My in game records show that I have personally invested upwards of 8,000 hours playing World of Warcraft specifically, and several thousand combined hours across the dozen or so other MMORPGs I’ve played over the years. It has had severely negative relations to work in my life, at times I’ve spent more than 100 hours per week playing the game for weeks at a time. I am however free from such dedication now, as I am lacking a community to keep my interest on the game. This is why I mentioned above that I might be the most qualified, or at least most researched, media studies analyst to discuss this subculture.

  • Through their negative or ambivalent relation to class (since subcultures are not 'class-conscious' and don't conform to traditional class definitions); (Gelder i)

This point is perhaps best exemplified by the 1993 comic from Peter Steiner, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. Class and standing have no bearing at all in this subculture. In an MMORPG, labels and social standing from outside the game don’t apply. I have a very specific anecdote in which I first interacted directly with this concept. During my time playing with one group of players that I had known for a few months, we were presented with a challenge of authority based on class. We had defeated a particularly difficult creature and when it came time to distribute the treasure, ‘Lailac’ a North Carolinian police officer took issue to the fact that ‘Flabby’, a Floridian high school student of almost half ‘Lailac’’s age. While ‘Flabby’ was leading the group and was attempting to maintain fairness in resource distribution, ‘Lailac’ refused to acknowledge the authority of “some kid”. He took his understanding of each of their real life selves and believed he could apply it to the world of the game. He was mistaken however, as, despite the age or occupation of ‘Flabby’ , he was still the group’s organizer and their out of game disputes had no baring on the world they now occupied.

  • Through their association with territory (the 'street', the 'hood', the club, etc.), rather than property; (Gelder i)

In World of Warcraft, players cannot own housing. Nor can they start towns, or businesses, create shops, factories, or have any kind of ownership beyond their personal effects and whatever they keep in an established bank in major cities. Though there were games in the past which allowed the creation and placing of some of these things in an open world, these games are, to my knowledge, all extinct. Instead in the current MMORPG paradigm, players occupy claimed territories. Areas such as major cities or favourite taverns become hotspots for given groups. All places in the game world persist without player interaction or ownership, though they are often left vacant for players to loiter and associate in. Beyond this, some groups are large enough that they do not have the capacity to occupy the same spaces all the time, and will therefore associate in virtual locations within the virtual online context. Players often simply create chat channels and other such communication connectivity in order to keep in contact with their larger whole. 

  • Through their movement out of the home and into non-domestic forms of belonging (i.e. social groups other than the family); (Gelder i)

This aspect will be one I get into significantly more detail about later in this paper. Suffice to say, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft provide users with the opportunity for communal and even familial experiences and associations without necessarily requiring you to subscribe to domestic forms of belonging. While I have known some players to play the game as a family – father, mother and child; brother and sister living together; two brothers still living at home – it is not the normative way players are connected. This aspect of the subculture does however broach the other aspect of moving out of the home into other forms of belonging, the idea of using the game to garner physical interactions. I will go into detail later about how this type of video game, while stereotyped as cloistered and based around sitting alone in a basement, is fully capable of facilitating the kinds of bonds and interactions required to garner meaningful long term relationships in any context.

  • Through their stylistic ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation); (Gelder i)

This aspect of the subculture is immediately evident to those involved in this community. This aspect is exemplified both in the competitive, and creative play styles of the game. Players who play competitively in either player versus player combat or raiding content as mentioned earlier, are prone to exaggerating their successes and capabilities. In much the same way a military squad may compare their number of kills or accomplishments in the field, players in these games will compare their ability to eliminate their enemies, be they player or AI, and even go over the specific measured statistics involved in completing that task. Though there are also those who play the game for a creative pursuit through Roleplaying. Roleplaying is the process of creating stories with others through the acting of one’s character in imaginary storylines. Excess and exaggeration come into play here due to the tendancy for players engaged in this type of play to idealize these character representations to be super-hero-like in their capacities and exploits, even in comparison with others in the context.  

  • Through their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and massification. (Gelder i)

As I’ve just touched on, MMORPGs are a pursuit that is often followed for escapism. This type of game is a fantasy world in which players are able to escape ordinary interactions; the frustrations and doldrums of everyday life are left behind. In this way, a game like World of Warcraft is engaged in for the same reason as any subculture, the chance to move outside the conforming unexciting life you lead of things like schedules and routines, and transcend to a world beyond – and a community beyond. 

  • Guilds

The way subcultural practitioners structure meaningful communal experiences in game is through the creation of a construct called “Guilds”. In World of Warcraft, a guild is a group of players that exist in some form of established leadership hierarchy that have easier ways of talking with and playing with each other due to the game’s systems. The forming and joining of a guild is often a very important part of a player’s ability to appreciate and experience the game. 

Essentially, in World of Warcraft, the faction of playable character species you play as is like one’s nation. Players often have fanatical devotion to a given faction, and can become very passionate about the given alliance of creatures that make up their ‘side’ in the conflict between said factions in the game’s storyline. In this way, one could consider the two ‘nations’ that make up the game to be like warring countries with strict borders, conflict zones, a language barrier, and an ongoing stalemate with scattered skirmishes. Beyond one’s nation, one’s guild is like a specific platoon of that nation’s army. The soldiers within that army have their own squadrons, and records, and there is a certain amount of pride involved with being part of said platoon, likewise for a guild.

Guilds work like player associations that allow for close-knit interaction with assumedly likeminded individuals. To continue the simile, within guilds there are often specific teams that guild members subscribe to; these are similar to military squads in the real world. These squads form close familial bonds, and build strategies together regarding their most efficient form of operation incorporating the roles each member is able to play – the soldiers on these teams, are the guild’s raiders or pvpers. So although players will interact with and perhaps enjoy the company of most of those in their guild, or platoon as it were, they are far more closely connected with their specific raid team or pvp team that they interact with and take on challenges with regularly.

Before I delve too deeply on guild types however, I’d like to address the reason why guilds are indeed a necessity by looking at a theory by Robert Putnam entitled ‘parallel play’. I will apply this theory to the context we are addressing here, that of MMORPGs, and address some of the implications when dealing with the way an online community combats the issues of parallel play.

The idea of parallel play is simple; children begin their early socialization by playing in the sandbox alongside other children. However, these interactions are not with each other, the children play within proximity to each other but they do not play together. We could say they play parallel to each other, together alone. Putnam’s theory is that through our increasing individualization we could train this same mentality into adults, forcing ourselves into a separation from human interaction. This concept encompasses a concept in video games in that it categorizes a stereotype based around immersive media – the stereotype that, despite playing the same game, we are not playing together with the other people.

This theory was created before such immersion as the internet or even sophisticated mobile devices. So we could extend that his theory would now state that our connection to our electronics are such that they may erode our respect for non-mediated human interaction and indeed for etiquette itself. This reading of mediation and electronics certainly puts the power structure firmly in the control of the marketplace. The emphasis seems to be that through our connection to these technologies we our empowering their producers through consumerization.

My experience of parallel play is drawn from online computer games. In my example I will attempt to relay the sophisticated relationship between individual and community in these games. I would like to illustrate that electronics can both encourage and deter this abandonment of communal interaction. MMORPGs are played with hundreds of thousands, often millions, of other people. Though, while technically interacting in the same world as each other, each person is individualized. Usually the user will play this game solo, not eliciting the assistance of others or often even interacting with others for the duration of their character’s formative experiences. This certainly exemplifies the negative individualized aspects parallel play implies.

However, this changes when the player reaches the maximum “level” they can attain. Eventually characters stop growing stronger from their adventures and must turn to increasingly more powerful armour and weapons to continue advancing. When this happens they will then seek out others to continue their adventures. At a point known as “end-game” when users can no longer advance alone, they will find other groups of players in order to take on increasingly difficult challenges and puzzles as a collective community. More than this, users who interact in this way enough often begin to create a shared culture with their group.
From here, users can often create bonds such that they extend their friendship beyond the mediation and into a more physical atmosphere. Not all groups in these gamers reach this level of community, but those that do move beyond the assumption of ‘parallel play’ and can instead strengthen their connections with a community culture despite their apparent focus on an individualized pursuit.

Guilds are created with the goal of garnering social inclusion and taking on these challenges. Though this community allows players to experience bonds and connections people they haven’t anticipated too. People in a guild are interacting in meaningful communal ways with people they wouldn't have even known about otherwise, and without any existence of a physical community. People separating themselves from their real lives isn't necessarily always about total social segregation. Although, yes, people can be cut off from their "real" lives, the game also creates the opportunity to have a communal experience with an entirely different group. This new group is usually far more diverse, and varied, with opinions and perspectives that one would be far harder pressed to find in their local community. Though, much like anything else, this community has the capacity for both. For, although someone could have a very rich communal experience, so too could one be a sole person existing within a community of millions. 

I have experienced both. When one is without a community of people that they enjoy interacting with one exists as an independent entity among swarms of community based groups. Though this could be considered a consequence of playing a game such as this, I would argue that the player cannot exist for long in this atmosphere without a real communal experience. The only reason these games stay popular is because they allow for a shared experience with those you enjoy the company of. If one leaves one MMORPG for another, without their friends, they are usually nowhere near as fulfilled even if the game itself is superior.  Likewise if someone is attempting to play an MMORPG alone, the game itself is too large, too daunting, with too little story to ever be immersive enough to play alone. This is because these games are built to be generic enough to be experienced as a small part of a larger whole –unlike normal RPGs which set the player as the only figure that can act. Someone trying to play an MMORPG alone will inevitably seek out other people, or else leave. People play for extended periods of time only if they can garner a meaningful social and communal experience.

As I mentioned earlier, Guilds are a pivotal way of holding social interaction together. They work as primary structuring entities. Guilds are often very focused in their pursuits, labeling themselves as a ‘pvp guild’, ‘raiding guild’, ‘rp guild’, ‘leveling guild’ or some combination of the aforementioned. Each one of these guild types garners stronger interconnectedness between its members and helps facilitate the team atmosphere and social creation I have mentioned. The guild type I will focus on for this paper will be the one I have the most experience with, raiding guilds.

There are certain groups within a raiding context that have become stereotypes. For the purposes of this paper, I will catalogue these into 3 groups. These groups are: the hardcore raiders, the semi-casual raiders, and the casual raiders. There is a fundamentally different atmosphere between a team that enjoys each other’s company, but has the ambition to use the team as a medium for their success, and a team that sees the interactions with the team as success. It is the manifestation of this difference that which helps to inform our understanding of the various categories of raid teams.  

The hardcore raiders are characterized by aiming to complete the most difficult content in the timeliest fashion. These players compete to be the best in their region, or the world. These raiders usually exist inside a guild based mostly around raiding, one that will define itself as a raiding guild. The goal is to defeat given ‘raid bosses’ as soon after they’re made available to players as possible, with special accolades to those who are the first in the world to do so. The statistics for this type of competition is tracked through various sites on the internet, and the guilds these players participate in are the equivalent of household names among gamers of that MMO. 

The highest level players of this group approach the game from the standpoint and devotion level that is a mix between a professional sports team and an Olympic athlete. Players will play and train relentlessly taking on a schedule that puts many hardcore players on par with having fulltime jobs or multiple full time jobs just to stay on top of progression. Based on the recruitment ads these players post on raiding progress tracking sites, many high end raiding guilds expect members to be available for raiding 8 hours a night every night. Beyond the raids, these players have many other demands put on them. 

There is a mandatory amount of time they must input optimizing their character by acquiring the best gear, and optimizing their gear with various available enhancements, as well as testing theory crafting. These types of raiders are often the bleeding edge of gameplay innovation, so the strategies they employ and the way they optimize themselves have to be created and tested personally. Simply put, players must decide what abilities and items they should use, what attributes to set up, which way to specialize their character, often for each individual boss fight. This requires hours of tedious practice, theorizing and testing using various in-game encounters, third party tools, and math with either paper or the ever popular spreadsheets. 

Part of the challenge with theory crafting is trying to work out the mathematical coefficients that govern the game’s systems. This is the equivalent of an athlete attempting to theorize the physics equations in play when they throw a ball or shoot a puck, in order to better optimize themselves for the next attempt. 

These hardcore players are characterized by the gaming community as being obsessed, rigid, egotistical, and as having lost the ability to enjoy the game as a pursuit of “fun”.  The level of dedication, time, and skill commitment required puts this group out of reach of all but a fraction of a percent of the player base of millions. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum we get the casual players, the ones who have little ambition to seek overall accomplishment. These casual raiders are those who attempt raid level content mostly, if not entirely, for the social aspect. Though they raid, they are often not in a guild that would define itself as a raiding guild. 
These player groups are traditionally easy going with leaders and members unwilling to berate their fellow players for lack of optimization. They are often content just to “have fun” playing the game with friends. Successfully completing content comes as a bonus, if it comes at all. These groups are often several difficulties of content behind their hardcore counterparts anyway however. 

Casual raiders will often only play one night a week and for only a few hours that night. Emphasis is put on the mantra “R.L. [real life] comes first”. The idea is that if something comes up to interrupt your play like children needing changing or looking after, that is always understood to take precedence over raiding. The group distributes the weapons, equipment, and other treasures dropped from a boss (‘loot’) in a more or less arbitrary fashion, with little focus or stress on rules surrounding who acquires which piece of gear each night. Usually these groups are not progressing quickly enough to move on to more difficult content before everyone’s received whatever items they need for whatever roles they wish to play. Some characters will build sets for every available specialization their class has, in order to play different group roles on different nights. The distinction is these players do this for the fun of playing another role, not for the optimization of the team. Competition is inherently missing from this group, not only with other groups but within their own team. These players show little interest in tracking the damage output of one another, or other pertinent statistics of a fight like healing or damage taken to avoidable mechanics. 

The effect of this lack of competitive inward focus and inability to be critical of other group members is two-fold. Firstly, there is less abrasion between team members over “lackluster dps” or blame about why a team isn’t able to complete a given encounter. The second aspect of a lack of competition in this context has to do with a lack of ambition and accomplishment due to placidity and casualness. As has been established in the scholarship of team management, healthy levels of competitive pressure and stress benefit a team’s ability to perform. Therefore, while this group is less prone to becoming agitated over performance, the lack of focus on any kind of optimization or discipline holds them back from ever accomplishing anything beyond basic progression. Due to this, many players that participate in these types of groups are contented with battling through challenges they’ve overcome numerous times before, but not for the sake of gear or dps personal bests like other groups. Instead this group of players does this again and again as an excuse to get together and enjoy each other’s company, even if the challenge of the encounter becomes trivialized. This is the only group of the three that would rather be the ‘big fish in the little pond’, able to move on to something more challenging but not doing so for the fear of losing the casualness and sociality. 

There is also a group that exists between these two extremes. They are a middle class that is not so devoted as to approach it as a career, nor so casual as to ignore optimization or discipline. These teams, ranging from semi casual to semi hardcore, are anywhere from a group of casual players who decide they’d like to compete, to raiders who act and optimise like hardcore players  but simply lack the time necessary to achieve world-class progression. The guilds they exist in may identify themselves as raiding guilds, though will often call themselves ‘casual’ raiding guilds, and attempt to casually pursue various aspects of the game. This group represents a ‘mean between two extremes’. They strive to compete for pride and bragging rights with whomever they can, though usually temper this with a need to thoroughly enjoy the game and the company of their fellow raiders. Their loot systems will vary from simply group consensus on who need the piece most, to rolling a set of virtual dice with the game’s number generating tools. Some more invested groups will go so far as to integrate more hardcore systems like Dragon Kill Points, or Konfer Suicide Kings. This group is the type that I have most recently been involved with, and from that raid team I was able to transition real life associations with these people beyond the game.

  • Team Full Brazilian
I initially came to be in ZeGuild, a guild created to cater to casual players with various in game pursuits, though its mention on a webcomic I frequent. Like five-hundred other individuals I promptly joined the guild in game and started interacting. Within a few months I had worked my way onto a developing raid team which came to be known as Team Full Brazilian. I raided three nights a week, for four hours each night, with this group. Two nights were just the ten players on our team, and one night was a twenty-five player raid involving more of the guild. It quickly became evident that the connections garnered from getting to know a group of ten players made the smaller raid the more enjoyable experience. 

The team quickly created a shared identity.  We made up stories and running jokes, in good fun, based around many of the members of our team. When one of our raid members arrived drunk to the raid one night we made a running joke that purported him to be a dionysiac figure. We created mythologies around many of the raid members in this way, based on minor (often inaccurate) details of their personal lives that we built up as major aspects of their personality. This kind of shared mythology was only known among our group and became an aspect of our shared culture. We also created things such as shared speech patterns, much of which came from our only French-Canadian raider who happened to pronounce many things incorrectly due to his accent. We developed new meanings among our group for many terms, to the point that someone could say something like “Nobbel (sic)”, “James Woods”, “Like Water”, “50 first raids” or “The Van” to name a few, and you would garner any number of nostalgic reactions based on our built up meanings for the words and phrases. 

Our group interacted in a way that might lead Terry Eagleton to define them as a culture. “People who belong to the same place… do not thereby form a culture; they do so only when they begin to share speech habits, folklore, ways of proceeding, frames of value, a collective self-image.” (Eagleton 37) Much of how we interacted lent itself to these definitions. Our group had similar way of defining value because of the tools we shared for critiquing each other’s efficiency in the raiding context.  Our group also had a collective image, that of the team. The team was depicted among our guild in a somewhat pejorative light due to our more hardcore focus on optimization and discipline within the raiding context, and this set us apart from the other teams and meant we shared an identity with both positives and negatives.

I believe it was the close knit atmosphere of overcoming very difficult content, combined with the shared culture that our small group built, that laid the groundwork for the transference of these relationships from the online game into physical reality.  Three of the members of the team I met at a gaming convention our raid leader hosted. The convention was held in Rhode Island and several guild members and team mates of mine went down to meet and enjoy the festivities. However, my interactions with the group were more overt when I went to a wedding. In October of 2010, two of our raid members got engaged. They were so invested in the team they sent out wedding invitations to everyone on our ten person team.  The plan was to meet for October of the following year. Members of our raid drove and flew in from as far North as myself in Ontario, to as far south as Tennessee. I shared a hotel room with someone I’d only ever met online at that point, and over the weekend went to an (appropriately) masquerade-themed wedding. 

A few months later, more of our raid team met at the house of the newly betrothed in New Haven, Connecticut. However, by this point, our raiding endeavours had petered out. We’d completed all we set out to in World of Warcraft, and many of us moved on to other games. However, this change of mediation did not impact our frequency of interaction. Our group kept in contact via Skype and has continued to stay connected and interact on a regular basis. The friendship and team dynamic that we garnered through the shared experience of raiding interaction not only transcended into real life, but has even transcended raiding itself. Our interactions have moved between and without media and have allowed for us to raid on other MMORPGs and for our team to branch into continued interactions on a number of other genres. 

  • Further Implications

It is through this kind of inter-media transference of socialization that I have also come to realize, the shift of friendships through mediation do not have to be one way either. For, while I have found I developed stronger relationships with those I met online within the last few years, and eventually garnered enough rapport to meet this team in person, I’ve since found real life relationships go the other way. As I look at those I have known from High School, and some even from University, and realize that some of my relationships are moving from a physical context to an online one, as more and more of my interactions with them are relegated to Facebook or skype. I have seen a very jarring reversal of the interactions I’ve had with my digital friends in the context of those I originally met in the physical world. I have found from my analysis that the barriers of human mediation as an interface for interaction are not simply one way. Online interactions can spur new physical friendships, but so too can physical friendships become so disconnected that they eventually evaporate into vague online associations.  

We are living in a world of complex interaction. Just one generation ago, a child’s circle of friends existed within a few blocks of their home. Those connections were garnered through physical interaction, or occasionally the mediation of landline phones. If you moved away, you could lose contact with them forever. As things stand now, one’s childhood friends can encompass the entire world. The connections one has can just as easily take place in a digital space with the mediation of instantly transferable text, voice over internet, and the ability to interact with virtual representations. These associations can constitute cultures and transition to the real world. Though those we lose physical contact with often still linger and transition from our physical lives to our digital ones – or soon none at all if we don’t interact. This, I find, is perhaps the most important aspect of the analysis of mediated interaction and its ability to transfer to other forms or other contexts.

Our digital interactions transferring offline simply makes it all the more clear that the transition can work in either direction. So, while we clamour for tools of mediation such as Facebook, the irony of ‘staying connected’ comes to light. It is only through our willingness to rely on these media channels to keep us in touch, that we lose the inclination to make the contact ourselves. We are content to have someone as a picture on Facebook, that we’ll perhaps never talk to again, and presume it to mean we’re staying in touch. While now, as a generation ago, we only stay in contact with those we interact with, we currently have the tools to pretend to be in touch -- a very dangerous trap to fall into. If my online friendship with my raid team has taught me anything, it’s that online interactions taking place through the mediation of virtual representations can still be more real that the relationships we pretend to cultivate in the real world. 


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