Players and the Love Game: Conceptualizing Cheating with Erotic Role Players in World of Warcraft

Drawing on roughly nine months of fieldwork within a United States-based World of Warcraft guild that actively role plays, this study examines how erotic role play (ERP) in the game challenges and reinforces Western conceptions of monogamy and fidelity. Data came from in-depth, in-game interviews with 14 self-identified erotic role players, whose mean age was 29 and whose ages ranged from the early twenties to the mid-forties. The participant pool was mostly based in North America, and the author situates the work within a broader PhD project that also addresses tabletop role playing. The paper's central aim is to revisit binary distinctions between cheating and fidelity, and between virtual and bodily experience, by considering how players negotiate in-game erotic relationships alongside offline romantic commitments.

The findings suggest that many participants in committed offline relationships did not regard their in-game sexual activity as infidelity. Participants who had been open with their partners about ERP often framed it as practice, foreplay, or a shared source of arousal, and they tied their sense of fidelity to disclosure, consent, and mutual trust rather than to the physical act itself. Some respondents argued that an online encounter never consummated in the flesh was not unfaithful, a position that aligns with earlier research on perceptions of cyber infidelity. The data also showed how role play can "bleed" into out-of-character flirtation, which in one case prompted a partner to feel deeply disturbed until the participant explained the nature of role play.

The study concludes that players in this setting are actively constructing their own rules for fidelity, which often diverge from the game's Terms of Use and from conventional assumptions about infidelity. Its qualitative, single-guild design and small sample limit generalizability, but the work offers a detailed account of how disembodied sexual play complicates the separation between virtual and real experience.