Comedy | October 27, 2009 | 7 comments

My husband has a virtual girlfriend!

source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/27/advisor-my-husband-h.html

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hpseaton
Meet Koh and Yurie. They're a happily married young Japanese couple who moved from Tokyo to San Francisco a year ago due to a job transfer. In early September, while on a business trip back home, Koh bought a new game cartridge for his Nintendo DS. It was mostly out of curiosity — the Japanese Twitterati were all abuzz over a new dating sim called Love Plus, and he just wanted to see what the hype was about. "I've tried the other dating sims before just for kicks, but I never got hooked," he says. "I didn't expect this to be any different." He was wrong.

During that one week in Tokyo, Koh found himself fully committed to his virtual relationship with Rinko, a pouty, hard-ass high school girl who hung out at the library. The relationship was formal at first, consisting of awkward whispered conversations in which she sent mixed signals and called him by his last name. As things got more heated, though, she started calling him Kohichi (calling someone by the first name still carries a degree of intimacy in Japan) and became more demanding of his attention. "I felt like I might get sucked into this world," Koh, who is an engineer at a major game manufacturer by day, tells me. "It's not like any dating sim with young girls in it becomes a hit, but this one is really well-made."

An article posted on a Japanese tech site in September told the story of several women who had complained on an online bulletin about how their family lives were disrupted by husbands addicted to Konami's hit game. Last weekend, I invited Koh and Yurie over to my house to talk about Koh's virtual relationship with Rinko, and how — if at all — it had impacted their real world husband-and-wife dynamic.

Interview at link.
  1. groups:
    Community,   Tech,   Comedy,   Current Tonight,   4 more
  2. tags:
    Love,  Relationships,  Computers,  Dating,  8 more
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7 comments // My husband has a virtual girlfriend!

  • MixMaster81
    • 0
      MixMaster81  

    • In cases like this, it's never the games fault, it's the player. If it was the game, then everyone who played it and got sucked into the immersive nature of it would react this way o.O

    • 2 years ago
  • ladyofwillows
  • ochreRobot
  • ochreRobot
    • 0
      ochreRobot  

    • LOL. That interview is awesome.

      My favorite quotes from Koh are.

      Koh: "I think this comes down to the fact that men are simple."

      And his answer to to the question, So what is your Love Plus girlfriend doing now?

      Koh: "I'm too scared to find out. I'm probably going to get in big trouble if I open it after leaving her alone for several weeks. Maybe she's dead now. That would be scary."

    • 2 years ago
  • Maeveeo
  • remanns
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