Remembering Bonnie Nardi's research on collaborative play in World of Warcraft (which I am using myself within my research paper), I thought back to this hilarious thread my friend emailed to me a month ago...
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14318775153&sid=1&pageNo=1
The "joke," even outside of the online MMORPG community, seems to be that guilds and in-game play foster romantic relationships. Perhaps you've heard a story about "players finding true love through their favorite internet game." I've even heard them briefly mentioned in class.
Taking this joke to a different level, this particular forum discussion reveals a parallel between "healers" and "girlfriends," and "tanks" and "boyfriends," in regards to romantic relationships. As the punchline goes, "I think my tank is seeing another healer." I didn't see Nardi's analysis of collaborative gamplay in WOW encroaching so obviously on romance as it does in this amusing little forum.
Furthermore, the association of "healers" to women, and "tanks" to men, actually provides some interesting insight into gender-associations made in regards to the anonymous avatar. Class discussion only briefly touched upon the subject of playing a virtual world as a female or male, but it never reduced the class roles of such characters down to sexual stereotypes. As made apparent in this particular WOW forum, the assumptions are that the healer (who takes a passive role during gameplay) takes on a feminine task and the tank (who takes an aggressive, offensive role) takes on a masuline one. The pronoun replacements of "healer" with "her" and "tank" with "him," by a number of forum contributors, also emphasize this gender bias.
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