Suboptimist

Eighteen people living in harmony.

Dan’s blog is down, so I am submitting this Final Fantasy 11 experience for him. We often exchange interesting stories about our experiences in the virtual world. Here we go:

So I have this FFXI friend, a mithra [a feminine race in the Final Fantasy universe] actually played by a woman. She’s just a level or two ahead of me, so we’re in the same range to party together for experience. She’s a dark knight, a DD, so the party invites aren’t always very common…and so she often asks (well, tells) me to organize a party so she doesn’t have to find a tank. Tonight I actually wanted to party, so I went ahead and organized a group with her help. It was a good party, I dinged to 69, and we played for two, maybe three hours (I’m sure you know how easy it is to lose track of time).

Anyway, sort of toward the end I sent her a /tell commenting on how rare and nice it is when the same group of people sticks together for as long as we did. She agreed, adding, “especially for a Saturday night.” I said fortunately I don’t have much of a social life and she asked if I wanted hers. I said I’d take part of it and she said I probably wouldn’t want it because it pretty much consists of guys hitting on her. I gave a modest laugh, something like a “Heh,” more as an interjection than because I actually thought it was funny. Seeing that she wasn’t offended, I facetiously asked, “Why, are you hot?”

She laughed and said it was a funny question and she didn’t know how to answer it and she asked what I considered hot and seemed to be enjoying herself and so I kept joking around along the same lines and before long she got all serious. She said my original question (about being hot) was tasteless and immature. Well, at first I was pretty sure she was overreacting a la Marquette, but after further criticism (as with any argument with a girl in which I’m not necessarily wrong), I started to feel bad and apologized profusely.

It felt very strange because I was still playing the game while talking to her. In other words, my character was defending her while I was defending myself FROM her. It was one of those kinda rare instances when we both looked past the characters on the screen and were communicating with each other. And I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to preserve my relationship with her, as much as I would with any friend I’d known since last September or whatever. It was also ironic because I usually enjoy being free of that kind of drama when I play video games.

Anyway, we finished the party and everyone left except us. If you open the attached image [below] you can see us standing at a confrontational distance. We were there, in that exact position, for literally 10 minutes arguing. Just as if it’d happened in person, I was terrified of moving my character a single step. I actually started laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was. It was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life and it didn’t even happen in “real life.”

We may submit this to the Daedalus Project.