Virtually Cheating

Last Thursday in class, Professor Perry presented an interesting hypothetical question. If you were to walk in on your significant other and he or she was having virtual relations with another avatar on his or her computer through an MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game), would you consider it cheating? When first presented the question, I thought that while I would have found the action extremely weird, I would not consider it an act of unfaithfulness. But after reading Kristin Kalning’s article “Is a Virtual Affair Real World Infidelity?,” I soon changed my mind. In her article, Kalning presents several people who had participated in virtual world relationships. With several examples, she explained how many people pursue very intense relationships through virtual world programs, and that these relationships were often stronger than any real world relationships that these people had. One married father would think up an excuse to sneak away to a computer to communicate with his virtual-world girlfriend any chance he got. He regularly spent more time with his virtual companion than his family on any given day. While this man may not have been physically cheating on his wife and family, I believe it definitely constitutes as an act of infidelity. This man was fulfilling his emotional, intimate, and companionship needs from another real life person outside of his family. It is hard to argue that this is not cheating.

Another interesting example in Kalning’s article was a 40 year old housewife who had a very deep relationship with another man on the MMORPG Second Life. She spent numerous hours a day interacting with him on Second Life and refused to ever discuss the relationship with her husband. The husband later found out that his wife was virtually married to this man on the online platform, and that the two had been having webcam chats often outside of the game. When the husband asked her to stop the relationship, the wife refused and it led immediately to their divorce. These examples show how a virtual relationship, while not physically cheating, can easily lead to the same result, and that a virtual relationship can often be more important to a person than a relationship in the real world.