The love affair between Tartlett the Priest and Jury the Mage began with a simple act of kindness in the wildly popular online game “World of Warcraft.”
Tartlett was killing monsters one day to gather enough gold to purchase a Gryphon flying mount. Jury offered her some gold from his massive surplus.
That gift sparked a friendship, as Jury and Tartlett raided dungeons, fought monsters, collected more gold and shared all the other activities that have made “World of Warcraft” so popular. Only in this case, the virtual friendship became a real one, when Michael Jurewitz, or Jury, and Johanna Lucas, Tartlett, began dating. They are engaged to be married next year.
While Internet dating sites have become a staple of romance in our digital age, I had never considered video games fertile ground for finding a partner until hearing the story of Jurewitz, 26, and Lucas, 31, who are now living together in San Jose. As we discussed their journey from virtual friends to real-life partners, I was intrigued by how the couple described the issues they encountered along the way, such as the difference between online and real-world identities, stereotypes about gamers — and how to tell grandma about where they met.
“It turned out the game was a great place to meet someone,” Jurewitz said. “It’s not like we went to a bar and this was the person I went home with. We were hanging out, really getting comfortable with each other before we met offline.”
And what became clear to a non-player like me was that the real attraction of “Warcraft” for many of its 11 million players around the world is the rich, social element it offers.
“It’s much more than a game,” said Bonnie Nardi, a UC Irvine anthropologist who spent five years exploring “Warcraft” for her recently published book, “My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft.”
“It’s really a new kind of world that affords a strong social experience.”
In “World of Warcraft,” players enter a mythical medieval world where they join one of two sides (the Alliance or the Horde) that are battling to control the world. They create a character and then join a team of players known as a guild. From there, they coordinate missions and attacks to gain points, which allow them to buy things and move to higher levels (or “level up,” as players say).
It’s tempting to imagine “Warcraft” as the province of pasty, socially challenged loners. Not so, said Nardi. The people she met in “Warcraft” were decidedly mainstream with rich social lives on the outside. “Warcraft” as matchmaking territory made perfect sense to Nardi.
“You already know you have a shared interest, and that’s always a good thing in any relationship,” Nardi said. “And it’s a safe place for a female. You can escalate relationships when you want, and progress more slowly if you choose.”
Tom Chilton, an executive at Blizzard Entertainment, which launched the game six years ago, said the company doesn’t have any statistics on the number of real-world relationships that start in the game, let alone the number of marriages. But he hears stories about such pairings all the time.
In fact, Chilton said he met his future wife at an offline “World of Warcraft” event, where they discovered they were in the same guild.
“It certainly can be a great way to get to know somebody without being blinded by the physical aspects,” he said. “And it’s a pretty common thread we hear that by the time they finally meet in person, they have a good idea what the other person is like.”
Meeting Jurewitz and Lucas certainly washes away stereotypes. She is a massage therapist and he is what Apple calls an “evangelist,” or someone who promotes the company’s products. Jurewitz began playing “Warcraft” with high schools friends, and then kept playing as a way to keep in touch through college. Lucas, who was living in Southern California, decided to try the game because her circle of friends included a number of “Warcraft” players who never stopped talking about it.
“I would get seriously annoyed,” she said. “It’s like, they’re speaking English, but they’re not speaking English.”
The first night she tried “Warcraft,” she played through dawn without realizing how long she’d been going.
As Jurewitz and Lucas began to go on missions together, he says that left him with a strong feeling about what Lucas was like in real life.
“Some folks get angry when things go wrong,” he said. “But she remained really calm and she had a good attitude.”
But both moved slowly, for a very interesting reason. While Blizzard doesn’t have statistics about how many women play, Warcraft is a male-dominated world. Jurewitz said that female players attract an abundance of unwanted attention. He didn’t want to be the creepy guy with a one-track mind.
At the same time, Lucas said a lot of male characters would offer to do things for her in Warcraft. She generally declined.
“It was very important to me that I do things on my own,” she said.
She’s not sure why she accepted Jury’s offer to help purchase the Gryphon, except that she sensed something she liked about him.
Their interactions in the game, where people communicate through text and voice chats, evolved to instant messages on AOL, then Skype calls, then pictures being exchanged.
Still, when it came time to meet in person, Lucas was nervous. Would people think it odd that she was going to meet someone that she’d gotten to know, not just online, but in “Warcraft”? She put that aside. On a trip to Monterey, she agreed to trek up to the South Bay to see Jurewitz.
Jurewitz said he was a nervous wreck the whole day. When she finally arrived, he threw the door open and they stared at each other, disoriented for a few moments.
“It was a hard thing to resolve,” Lucas said. “I’d never met him. Who was this stranger?”
Jurewitz had a similar reaction: “I know this person. But do I know this person?”
After standing frozen for a few moments, Jurewitz broke the silence by saying, “Hello, beautiful.” Once she heard the sound of the voice she recognized from their talks playing the game, the tension melted away.
There followed months of weekend visits and lots of money spent on Southwest airline tickets.
But then they faced a new dilemma: How to answer the question of how they met? Some of their closest friends knew. But it proved trickier with many other friends, family and co-workers. Jurewitz said they weren’t embarrassed, but at the same time, it required a longer conversation that sometimes they just wanted to avoid.
“How do you explain to your grandmother, ‘Oh, I met her in a video game,’ ” he said. Instead, they stuck with the tried and true “met through friends,” which wasn’t exactly untrue.
Gradually, though, they began to tell a wider circle. And they were pleasantly surprised at the positive reactions they got, including several people who said they also met their partners through “Warcraft.” And Jurewitz says they eventually explained their meeting to his grandmother, who took it in stride. “So it’s just like if you met at the Y,” she said.
Last year, they got engaged and moved into a San Jose house together. They had a vacation to Germany planned this summer. He started a blog for their trip. And in one of the first posts, he told the world the story of their relationship.
“If you had told me three years ago that I would both find the love of my life and be headed on a European vacation to pick up my dream car with her, I’d have said you were crazy,” Jurewitz wrote in a post on June 15. “Now, if you would have told me I’d meet this dream woman while playing ‘World of Warcraft,’ I’d have just laughed at you.”
But that is love, Silicon Valley style.
Contact Chris O’Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/sjcobrien and read his blog posts at www.siliconbeat.com.
VIRTUAL IDENTITIES
