Degrees of Friendship

Gordan over at We Fly Spitfires, had a lovely post about friends in MMOs, and it made real good sense…..if you weren’t me.

I don’t put friends in buckets, and define them in terms like “real” or “online”, to me it’s binary, either you are my friend or not, either you are with me, or against me. To me a friend is any who take their time to help me out. Let’s take my friend Scarybooster, I never met him, I never been to his crib, I don’t even really know his real name. (He told me once, but I drink alot) To me it doesn’t matter, he has earned my loyalty, and respect for he always helps me out, and is a man who has integrity. I try to return that to him. That’s just one example. Just because I never met someone does that mean that person is less than a friend, nope not in my book.  Heck Scary’s done more for me then some of the people I know, and called friend in the past.   

Sure I have friends who I spend more time with, or do activities with more, doesn’t make the rest of my friends any less of friend in my book.  I wouldn’t ask a friend who doesn’t like sports to a baseball game, well I might ask, but I would know the answer. Perhaps I’m old school, perhaps I have an idealist wet dream of what friendship is, but then again maybe in this day and age we are too hung up on labels. We want to classify everything, put everything, and everyone into a convenient box.

To me when I started to travel the lanes of the internet superhighway, it seemed there was a purity that was there. I talked to people and it didn’t matter who they were, what they were, where they came from, the physical was gone. It was like my soul, talking to theirs. I know silly romanticism of technology, but that’s what I fell in love with.

Some people portray a different person on the internet, or in their games then they are in real life, not me. What you see is me, the core of me. Sometimes brash, sometimes an asshole, but I am always honest to what and who I am, and I never get to big for my britches to admit when I am wrong, and to make sure I make amends.

Bottomline, I’m not going to stop any trends, or become the leader of some movement, but I’m trying to make a  point. I don’t like this thing or trend of quantifying friendship, and to me it  is not a good thing. If I say I’m your friend, and that I count you among mine, you can be damn sure I mean that….

Oh also realize not everyone that hangs around me is actually my friend.