Virtual Friendships

Yesterday I went out and bought a game for my Playstation 3 called ‘Eye Pet’.
I did this for three reasons. Firstly it was a cheap way of getting the camera which was packaged in the box and I have wanted for a while now, secondly I had a voucher to use up, and finally the game is really an advanced digital pet which you interact with through your movements captured on the camera, and anything like that has always interested me. I rushed out on day one to get a Nintendo Wii because of the immersive nature of the machine, and wasted all my pocket money on a VR arcade game when I was a kid.
Why am I telling you this? Well when I booted up the game my wife sat there for about ten minutes, whilst I waved my hands and arms about like a lunatic trying to get the monkey thing on screen to jump, before asking me,
“What have you wasted your money on that for? You will never use it again, you do know it’s not real, don’t you!”
My wife probably is right it will sit there collecting dust for a few months, before I trade it in for a fraction of what I paid for it. But she was wrong about the reason for buying it. I didn’t buy it to have a ‘pet’, I was just curious as to what level the technology worked.
The point of that massive rambling story was to point out the fact that my wife thought I had purchased the game for some kind of friendship or relationship with this piece of software, I didn’t, but with 99% of the sales this is possibly true. Little kids playing with fresh air and a TV screen instead of a puppy or kitten. People can argue that it is purely for entertainment or educational purposes for the eventuality they ever got a ‘real’ pet, and I have no problem with it on a moral or ethical stand point. However I do feel it raises an interesting argument, at what point do our friendships and relationships with ‘others’ through a digital medium become ‘real’, and what impact is that going to have with people’s social interaction skills?
What I didn’t mention earlier is that whilst my wife was mocking me for playing with my ‘pet’, named Gizmo by the way, she was sat there with a laptop on the arm of the sofa, signed into Facebook, like she had been for the previous hour and a half. On a base level I have no problem with social networking sites, I use them to keep in touch with friends who live too far away or arrange meetings with others, but that is it. If I want to talk to someone, I phone them up or physically go to see them and spend time with them, however more and more of my friends and family just use those screens to send messages back and forward to each other without actually ever seeing or talking to the person anymore. I have younger relatives who are still children, and when you ask about friends and what they do, they do know the person from school or a club, but they play computer games together over the internet not even in the same room, talking through headsets. My understanding is that 90% of communication is achieved without a spoken word, i.e. facial expressions, body language, but in these ‘friendship’ situations 100% of communication is achieved through spoken word, and that is what I mean by worrying about these people’s social skills.
I also worry that friendships seem to be becoming ‘diluted’. Everyday I receive friend requests on my Facebook page, but they are from people I once bumped into on a street whilst on holiday in 1998, and maybe said “sorry” to. I exaggerate, but my point is they are people who are not really my friend and never have been, they are acquaintances at best, yet people are willing to except them and allow them to view personal thoughts and comments at their leisure, along with 500 others. I don’t think I have even spoken to 500 human beings in my life. Yet people continue to collect others like Pokèmon, and lavish time replying to each and everyone of them but at a very shallow level, never truly building a strong friendship.
I know these views seem like the extreme negative side of products which are basically designed for consumer enjoyment, and I also know that I am very funny when it comes to issues like trusting others, especially with personal information, however I can say with confidence that this is an increasing trend over the past few years and don’t want the word ‘friend’ to only mean a name in a list of hundreds, within a few more years.


To check out 'Eye pet' visit www.eyepet.com