This Friendship Has Been Digitized

Small correction: You mention the BBC report about Mats Steen, and how some of his online friends flew to "the Netherlands" to attend his funeral. Mats lived in Norway and was laid to rest there, not in the Netherlands.

Many children and even adults have imaginary friends not online, but alive with projected qualities and personalities.

Living in a pure state with no entanglement has been sought by many with a philosophic or religious bent. Who’s to say that it is not preferable to the messiness of decoherence?

IMHO, you need to make a distinction between today's online games like Fortnite, where you get a reset of players every 30 mins, and older MMO games like World of Warcraft where you had to build a social network -and reputation - over hundreds of hours of gameplay.

You’re overthinking it. Gamers like to play with or against real people, because they do much more interesting and unique things than an artificial intelligence can. And yet real people have real world concerns that will take them away from a game right in the middle of a mission, round or whatever. Things like having to leave for work, sitting down to dinner with their family or any other number of real world interactions. So the artificial intelligence that takes over is to the benefit of the player who doesn’t have to log off, and would really like to have the opportunity to finish the mission, round or whatever that they’ve been investing a certain amount of time in. Why should they be penalized because of the the other player’s schedule conflict? And as far as the term “friend” goes, you are definitely overthinking it. People claim to have millions of “friends” on Facebook. Yeah, right. We all know that this is a shortcut for internet acquaintance. I’m sure that your child knows the difference between someone they have never met and someone who is actually their friend. Relax, it’s just a game.

For good or bad, the nature of “friendship” is changing. Scuzzball provides the author’s son with one aspect of adolescent friendship, playing games together, and they have a kind of unwritten agreement to limit their friendship to that aspect. Sometimes one person in an online relationship would like to take it to another level, while the other would not. Friendship seems to be morphing almost like the business world has changed. Many of us used to be generalists, providing services in our broad area of expertise, such as accounting, law, human resources and engineering. Now the business world wants “fit for purpose”. It wants an accountant expert in derivatives accounting, a lawyer expert in securities law and an human resources person expert in executive compensation, as examples. Professionals have been forced into niched pigeon holes to meet the demands of the business world as it has evolved. Perhaps friendship is changing, too, in this way. Where one or two “friends” met one’s needs 25 years ago, maybe several will be required now, to provide different aspects of friendships. Scuzzball provides the game playing. Someone else will need to be the confidant, sports opponent, homework helper and the like. Assuming, of course, that the author’s son ever leaves his X-Box.

If things are perceived as or experienced as real, then they are real in their consequences. There's no reason to assume that friendships and relationships originated and pursued on-line, including those in which the parties never physically meet, are any less intensely felt than those in which the parties are in each others physical presence. After all, as I mentioned in a comment this evening for another Times column regarding physical human contact becoming a luxury for the rich, human beings have evolved to be social, and isolation is a tortuous punishment, but apparently we can interact with myriad beings--people, screen avatars, robots, animals--in myriad ways, the only overarching necessity being that the other party be able to interact with us in a recognizable and meaningful fashion. So, social is as social does.

While it is true that there are negative effects from relying too much on digital “friends”, there are also great benefits. There are people I have met in real life, but are not especially close to me. Yet, through social media, we keep tabs on each other’s lives and maintain a friendship that probably wouldn’t last, if it were totally reliant on face to face meetings. It allows me to have a wider circle of friends.

I find myself conflicted on the issue. One moment I hate technology because I look around during family dinners and I watch my nephew and nieces looking like lobotomized drones staring at their screens while my aging parents try to form bonds with them. At the same time, if I want to connect with someone in Estonia this week and learn about their language, I probably can--there are websites for that. That is something that was inconceivable thirty years ago. If I have a sick day and can't leave the house, I can chat with someone across the world in seconds, with a press of a button, for free. That was inconceivable thirty years ago. The world is changing, whether we like it or not. As for me, I will cautiously ride this wave, careful to not drown myself in it but also aware that I can enhance my life through it.

When the narc ex destroyed my family, taking my children from me, telling our friends that I was the abuser--after he raped me, and had been abusing me for years--the only thing that kept me going, was a strong community of friends in a massively multi-player online wargame. Those people cared about me. Most of them have faded over the last two years, mostly due to the dying game, yet I decided to prioritize spending time in the Real World. I wanted to be present in my own life. But that first Christmas alone, when my children were gone and I wanted to leave this world from the pain of my own grief, online friends were there. They checked on me. Many of them were spending Christmas alone, too. We were all not-alone together. They got me through the pain. On the February day, when I signed away custody of my children, to the abusive ex and his minion, unable to get a lawyer and too sick to fight, it was a gaming "friend" who I've literally never met who called me on the phone and talked to me for hours until he fell asleep from exhaustion. He had been up since 5 am. "Real life" friends come and go too. The measure of a friendship is if they are there when you really need them. Real life is not automatically better, it's just meatspace. Is it real or is it digital? You decide.

I see in childcare - a best friend right now is the one who's with me right now - quickly replaced if one leaves and another arrives. This is a beauty of tiny kids - first toddler steps go towards the nearest adult - who is assumed to be family. Only slightly older do they have to be trained - when in public, the closest person may not be family so think twice.

My online friendships saved me after my child died. I needed to be among people with the same experience and for the first time I felt jealous of those who still had their children and couldn't bear to hear about their children, a subject that had been the basis of many friendships. And for those teenagers who may struggle to find friends at school, finding digitizes friends may just be their healthiest non-drug alternative saving grace.

My son’s high school friends live all over a rather large metropolitan area. Getting together for an hour or so would require more travel time than they’d have to hang out, and there’s no way they can take a short break together on a school night. They love the ability to play the online games together. And they argue over the headsets just like they do in the living room. And as a side note, have you ever tried as a dorm living dining hall eating undergrad, to bring a sick friend a bowl of soup? Maybe not the best friend test out there.

I'm an old -- born in the tail end of the Baby Boom. But I'm also, and entirely inadvertently, an early adopter of online friendships, having been part of an anime-related chat room for nearly 20 years. My much younger friends have invited me to 5 weddings at last count, all over the country, and one of them even came to my husband's funeral. I've also given money and other resources to folks from the group when there was need, knitted baby blankets, proofread resumes, and asked for similar support when I needed it. We are not physically close, which makes it harder to do for each other, but not impossible!

It’s really a matter of distinguishing the mutual emotional attachment of friendship that goes with another living being, human or animal, from the purely entertaining realm of online interactions, be it with a remote person or a bot.