It is love at first kill

This is a love story. It began on a hot summer night in Santa Barbara, California, when Tamara Langman helped kill the yellow-eyed demon known as Prince Malchezaar. She was logged into World of Warcraft, the multiplayer fantasy game, and her avatar — Arixi Fizzlebolt, a busty gnome with three blond pigtails — had also managed to pique the interest of John Bentley, aka Weulfgar McDoal.

World of Warcraft is a vast online game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, but it is also a social networking experience. When players aren’t battling monsters, their avatars are exploring fantastical landscapes (lush jungles, snowy forests, misty beaches), where they can meet and gab via the game’s instant message feature, or through voice communication software.

And so Langman and Bentley found a quiet spot for their avatars to sit. Hours evaporated as they discussed everything from their families to their futures. Sometime before dawn, Langman realised that while she was in the fictional world of Azeroth, she was also on a date.

For the next two months, Langman, 27, and Bentley, 24, rendezvoused in Azeroth, until one day they decided to meet in Santa Barbara instead. When Bentley stepped onto the tarmac at the Santa Barbara airport on a bright October afternoon in 2008, Langman ran to him. Bentley scooped her up into his arms and spun her around. He had planned to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to Atlanta. But two weeks became two years, and Bentley and Langman are still together.

Who knew a World of Warcraft subscription could deliver more romance than Match.com?

While it may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, more people are likely to meet this way as the genre (known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) continues to grow. With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 per cent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

To help her navigate World of Warcraft, Ramona Pringle, an interactive media producer and a professor of new media at the Ryerson School of Image Arts in Toronto, enlisted Brent George, the animation director for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, to be her guide. They began playing last summer — she from Toronto, he from Montreal — as many as six hours a night. The beginner’s guide to World of Warcraft notes that you can go it alone, “but by going it alone, you won’t be able to master some of the game’s tougher challenges, you will likely take longer to reach the endgame, and you won’t have access to the game’s most powerful magical treasures.” Pringle thinks that is analogous to love.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service