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A nice day for a 'Second Life' wedding

About a year after they began playing NCSoft's City of Heroes, an online game in which players take on the roles of superheroes fighting villainy, Ruggieri and his girlfriend found themselves prowling around in the game one day.

They were sitting next to each other in real life, and at one point, she asked him not to look at her screen. "Finally, she says, 'Okay, you can look now,' and I look at the computer... and she had her character kneel down and she just proposed to me," Ruggieri recalled. "Of course I said yes to her in-game and turned to her and said yes in real life." Now Ruggieri and his fiancé are planning their real-life wedding, but at the urging of many of their friends in the City of Heroes community, they're planning in-world nuptials as well.

"Once the City of Heroes community found out about how we got engaged in-game," he said, "they all started begging that we have an in-game marriage. So we'll eventually have some sort of in-game ceremony as well."

To Alan Crosby, the global director of community relations at Sony Online Entertainment, which publishes such online hits as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, in-world ceremonies have been a frequent part of his job.

Crosby, who used to be a senior SOE games master, said he had been a part of at least 20 such ceremonies and that he and his staff were often called on to officiate.

"We'll bring digital wedding rings, cookies, milk, ale and wedding cake," Crosby said about the many ceremonies he's seen in EverQuest. "Usually, we have them in a nice, scenic area. If they were evil characters, you would often have them in Neriak, the dark elf city. And if they were good... somewhere nice with a waterfall... Then we would pronounce them happily elves or trolls or whatever."

Indeed, Crosby said many of the weddings he remembers involved at least one elf, and often two elves marrying each other. "My personal hunch," he explained, "is that a lot of romantics play elves, and they tend to marry other elves."

Second Life community manager Jeska Dzwigalski has seen an infinite number of oddball characters getting married in-world, so many that she has put together a mass wedding that will take place on Valentine's Day. She has gathered ten couples who will take the plunge at a cathedral that was commissioned specifically for the occasion.

"We will probably have same-sex couples," she said. "And the gender of the real person [behind the avatar] is, of course, unknown. So that's an interesting thing, and it doesn't matter to us. It's kind of neat."

With so many couples using virtual worlds as a place to explore love, many of the virtual weddings involve couples with no real-world connection. But some, like the one Ruggieri and his fiancé are planning, are about an extension of true love.

To Crosby, those are often the most memorable.

"Because you knew that they had already done this in real life, or were going to... it had some special meaning," Crosby said. "When two characters get married in-game, but not in real life, they're just goofing around. But it's really special when they're married in real life and they bring that attachment into the game world."