In an essay featured on Salon, Debra Sparks recounts the events surrounding her 13 year old son’s first rendez-vous with a girl he met while playing a computer game called “Minecraft.” Sparks’s essay raises questions regarding the possibility of forging virtual friendships, and how these relationships compare to those that take root in “real life.”
Sparks writes, “Aidan’s parameters when it comes to the real world and the cyberworld are not my own, and even if I want to change that, I can’t.”
There is some comfort to be found in the final line of Sparks’s piece. Upon asking her son’s cyber friend how the rendez-vous went, Debra receives the response, “We really got along. It was just like normal.”
