Last November, thousands of online viewers witnessed the wedding of Sal 9000 and Nene Anegasaki. Sal 9000 is a 27 year-old resident of Tokyo, Japan and Nene Anegasaki exists in an online game. Love, an elusive emotion pondered by poets, philosophers, fortune-tellers and songwriters throughout the millennia, has been re-engineered by a computer programmer. Love Plus for Nintendo DS is a game that allows players to interact with three different avatars in hopes of getting one to fall in love. Once this has been accomplished, players must then increase interaction to keep their avatar lover interested. The more players interact with their avatar, the more attention is required to maintain the relationship. This investment caused Sal to fall in love with his avatar and now he claims he would not leave her for a real woman.

As humans it seems we’re all programmed to love, but as society has developed we’ve done it in different ways. For example, it was well into the middle-ages before the idea of marriage by consent was established in Europe. Before that, marriage was simply a mutually beneficial arrangement between families, not between two willing parties.

In contemporary culture, the pressure to find your “soul mate” is likely contributing to both the high divorce rate and the use of computer software/websites like eharmony.com to find a compatible match. Couple this with overpopulation and the ability to fertilize eggs outside the uterus and you’ve created an environment where a marriage between a human and an online avatar might be the best evolutionarily model.

While we may need to upgrade our own “software” in order to accept this changed view of marriage, I predict the hardware is going to have no trouble keeping up. The popularity of the newly launched iPad portends that computers aware of their and our simultaneous existence (the iPad knows when it’s being flipped and tipped etc.) might soon be the norm. If love is too strong a word at this point, you might at least grant that there is a mutual appreciation developing here. (>wink<) Killin it!