I'm sure we've all heard about virtual love stories. Of how lovers met their soul mate online, through social networks or online video games, and eventually ending up happily ever after with each other. It's not surprising considering how wired we are in today's modern world.

Among all these virtual love stories, one especially caught my attention yesterday. The story is quite old, almost a year old already, but i think it still strikes me as oddly peculiar. Sal9000's story is like any love story you would expect to hear. He met his wife, named Nene, through a Nintendo DS game called Love Plus and after sharing many experiences together, they decided to tie the know together. There's only one catch. You see, Nene isn't a real person, or human, as you would call it. She's a character from the game which means she's not real.

Meet Miss Nene, Sal9000's future wife

 But Sal9000 is a human alright and they did have a real wedding attended by real human guests, 40 of them, including one real priest to bless the wedding. There's a video you can see later at the end of this post.

The bride and the groom

Whether this is just a ploy of this guy to gain popularity or he's really serious, only he knows. Some speculates that this is only a marketing ploy by Konami to promote their game while others who claim to know the real guy says that he's really in love with her. There's very little follow up to this news and one year onward, a quick Google search reveals nothing about how the couple is doing right now.

Looking at this guy kinda reminded me of the numerous "girlfriends" i would have from all my years of video gaming. If i were to follow his steps, i think the number of my wives would be more than the emperor of China last time. Among the wives that i would have now if i had chosen to profess my love for them would be:

Miranda from Mass Effect 2. She's one hot girl and she's one of my comrades aboard the Normandy, one of the well know human ships in the Mass Effect 2 universe. Together we have fought countless aliens together in order to protect humanity and of course, sparks are sure to fly when you're risking your lives together. And we even had sex before (in the game, of course).

Aerith would be the girlfriend from my adventures in Final Fantasy 7. Don't quite remember the details but i'd sure remember we had lots of fun time together. Oh wait, i forgot. She can't possibly be my girlfriend. Because that idiotic Sephiroth had to kill her halfway through the game :(

Ah, Kerrigan. The girl that gave me the most headache. Just after i develop a crush on her she had to be abducted by those horrible Zergs who turned her into an ugly alien. Love prevails of course, because after 10 years in the waiting i finally managed to save her from the grasps of the Zerg and turned her back into human at the same time too! Too bad her hair still looked like those alien tentacles.

Okay, this gonna be quite hard because i had loads of girlfriends and wives from Sims 3. Or at least the Sim that i thought symbolizes me the most had. Maybe i should just skip this game.

Okay, this is gonna be embarrassing because i forgot her name. I do remember that she was my assistant though when i was busy saving the world from Soviet Union and Japan. And she's from Red Alert 3. Well, at least she's hot.

These are just only a few girls that i can remember from all my years of video gaming. There's a whole loads of others too, like the eight girls from Harvest Moon, some Japanese game that i forgot what it is and i even have two real people girlfriends from an online game last time. Only that i do not know whether they are real girls or not, given the number of guys disguising as girls on online games.

Reading this digital love story just proves a few things to me. Either that Japan's population are lacking in girls until guys are running out of choices until they have to look elsewhere or that even if they have an equal female population, the females' qualities are that bad until  they are actually losing out to the virtual girls that are not even real.

Or this guy really needs to get a life. You can catch the seriousness of the impact of video games if this guy is for real. Maybe they should introduce more ugly looking girls in video games. Or don't include girls at all. Wait, the last thing we want is guys turning gay because of video games.

And they wonder why Japan's birth rates are so low, even with such active adult entertainment industry. I guess guys there prefer inserting into USB ports rather than a real girl's *ahem*. Perhaps i seriously need to stop my gaming habits too if i want to keep any hopes of finding myself a real human girlfriend alive.

Anyway, fast forward to the present, a there has been no news about how this guy is doing with his wife or whether they have kids already or not. There have been no reports too of other guys doing the same thing after him, or i did not hear about it, so i guess humanity is still quite safe for the time being.

That being said, i'm gonna return to half an hour of monster slaying with the few of my girlfriends before heading off to sleep later.

*****

By the way i've included a video regarding this incident below, one about the marriage itself and the other of the groom's interview. Many thanks to Lisa Katayama from Boing Boing for the videos and story.