CASE: VIRTUAL TWO-TIMING

Mitch and Meghan have been close friends since junior high. They attend the same college, but they rarely see each other because they are pursuing different majors. Last year, Meghan started dating Erik, who is in many of Mitch’s classes. Mitch discovered that he and Erik share an interest in massively multiplayer online games and they’ve recently started teaming up in one game.

Erik is part of an online guild, a group of players with whom he regularly meets to work on challenging parts of the game. A month or two after Mitch joined the guild, he started to notice that Erik spent the majority of his time in the game teaming up with a female guild member named Raquel. Mitch did not think much of it until Valentines Day. On Valentines Day the game has a special event that allows players to wear a sash that says “—’s Sweetheart.” Erik’s character was wearing a sash that said “Raquel’s Sweetheart” and Raquel was wearing one that read “Erik’s Sweetheart.”

Mitch started to worry about his friend Meghan. Was Erik cheating on her with Raquel? Mitch confronted Erik about this, but Erik’s position was that he was not doing anything wrong. His reasoning was that:

■ They were playing a role-playing game. Raquel and Erik were only pretending to be boyfriend/girlfriend. Even though they were emotionally very close, and spent a lot of time together online, the boyfriend/girlfriend relationship was just part of the game.

■ Raquel and Erik have never physically met, so they cannot really be considered boyfriend/girlfriend anyway.

■ Because Meghan does not care about or understand online games, it is best not to tell her about Raquel; she will misinterpret the relationship.