In our modern world of instant communication, email, message boards, cell phones, and text messages, three days is a very long time to go without hearing from someone.
I remember listening to the song “The Picture” by Sheryl Crow (featuring Kid Rock) at work one night. The line, “I ain’t heard from you in three damn nights,” followed by “I can’t look at you while I’m lyin’ next to him,” sparked one of the older generation of women in my office to comment in disgust about the song. She just couldn’t believe that this woman would move on after not hearing from her man for only three days.
At the time I agreed with her perspective. Three days seemed a bit short for making a choice like that. She must have had this other guy in the works and was just waiting for an excuse to move on to him. But recently, I’ve found another perspective.
I’ve been thinking about MMO gamers and how we interact with each other. We spend more time together than some spouses do. Every night I spend a good 3 to 5 hours online with these friends, their voices in my ear and our characters chill’n in the same virtual space. Even on the weekends we pop in after doing our chores or after our plans with our real world family and friends have been completed. We catch up, let each other know where we’ve been, what we were up to. Even if the only thing we accomplish in the game at that time is checking our mail or putting something up on the auction house, it’s the interactions with the people we play with that make us log on for those few minutes before bed, even on the long days.
When one of our own goes a full 24 hours without logging in, we wonder where they are, what they’re up to. Most of the time we’ve told each other the night before that we won’t be around the next day. We always tell someone when we’ll be gone for more than a day, “The family and I are going camping this weekend. Don’t expect to see me until afterwork on Monday.”
So, when one of our own doesn’t log in for three days, and they never told anyone beforehand that they were going away, it generates a world of worry for the rest of us left behind. Even with all our different forms of communication, if someone decides to take a break, they can literally just disappear.
There are acceptions to this. There are usually pods of individuals who all know each other outside of the game and if one of them disappears, there’s always word through one of their friends on where they’ve gone. But every so often you have that one person who nobody realized they didn’t have a tie to outside the game. How could that person be such an everyday part of your life, and then all of the sudden, they just dissapear?
Three damn days can be a really long time when this happens. It can be enough for you to need to move on. Some questions will never have answers, and all you can do is let them go and hope that maybe someday, the person will come back and tell us their story.
