Virtual Friends: Imaginary, or Imaginative?

Imaginary Friends

A large percentage of children flex their developing imaginations and create entire personifications of their own to play with during their youth. We call them “Invisible Friends”, or “Imaginary Friends”, and they’ve been the subject of much controversy over the years. Parents often want to know if it’s common, or “normal”, for their children to make-believe in such ways as to carry on entire conversations with imaginary friends, host imaginary tea-parties with them, or even go so far as to introduce them to real-world people.

Is there a cause for concern? Studies done on this matter over the years indicate that not only is it common and relatively normal given the large percentage of children who manifest imaginary friends, but it’s also healthy for their development and general well-being.

Imaginary, or Imaginative?

Contrary to common stereotypes surrounding children with imaginary friends, recent research indicates that manifestations of imaginary friends are more commonly found with happy children than with unhappy children. Rather than resulting in shy or withdrawn behavior, having imaginary friends may actually promote social understanding at an earlier age and result in happier, more outgoing children. As it turns out, interacting with imaginary friends can actually be an imaginative way to develop social skills at an early age.?

Sadly, imaginary friends seem to always fade away with time and age, replaced by real-world friends as we make our way through life. They’re relegated to being the subjects of heart-felt children's movies meant to evoke feelings of nostalgia within us, or the punchlines of jokes told around family gatherings while reminiscing about the goofy behaviors we had as children.

But what if these imaginary personifications from our childhood didn’t have to be so imaginary anymore, and could even stay with us through the years and interact with other people’s imaginary friends, too? It’s actually not a far stretch of the imagination to see what this would look like. The idea of virtual companions has been toyed with ever since the first interactive video game characters hit the scene, and the rapid rate of technological innovation thereafter has already begun to blur the line between imaginary and imaginative friendships.?

What’s the Difference?

It can seem like a trivial pursuit to compare the imaginary with the imaginative, but in the realm of imaginary friends it can mean the difference between an open-to-interpretation description of them and a vividly drawn depiction. It can be a pretty big difference, whether we consciously recognize it or not. We stick such drawings to our refrigerators with magnets and share pictures of them on social media, or in-person with family, friends and workplace colleagues.?

Viewable and interactive representations of our imagination act as proud public showcases of our creativity and windows into our mind. These manifestations have no limit and can appear as creatures, things, humans, or whatever else we so desire. In the realm of intangibles, what ultimately matters is what we choose to give value to, why we give it such value, and how we choose to recognize that value publicly. As interactive technologies have advanced, virtual characters and online interactive experiences for them have become an increasingly common medium for expressing our imaginations.

A recent study done on the relationships between artificially intelligent characters and children, as well as with adults, showed that these types of virtual characters can offer various psychological and emotional benefits to us without deluding our perceptions of reality. For example, in the study most preschool-age children acknowledged that their imaginary companions were not real, but still valued the high-quality friendships they provided; a key difference between imaginary friends and virtual characters is the level of reciprocity provided by sufficiently advanced artificially intelligent virtual characters, and their ability to feel like a “real” friend with a unique personality.

The Birth of Virtual Personalities

The convergence of our imaginations and interactive technologies first spawned virtual proto-personalities in the late 1990’s, with Tamagotchi and Clippy both hitting the scene in 1996. In the few decades since, incredible innovations to these technologies have given rise to a plethora of interactive virtual characters, as well as today’s Holy Trinity of virtual assistant personas – Cortana, Alexa, and Siri. Google Assistant is arguably just as impactful and would make the cut if it had a more relatable name, acting as further testament to the importance of instilling our virtual friends with characteristics that can be empathized with or nurtured.

Tamagotchi Madness

Many of us recall the mind-blowing revelation that was Tamagotchi, a virtual pet that could be taken anywhere and nurtured to grow, or could also die or run away if uncared for. For children at the time of Tamagotchi’s release, these digital pets offered a unique form of on-demand companionship; a chance to prove their responsibility to their parents and be deemed worthy enough for a real pet animal. For adults, they were little more than curiosities or novelties, chances to bring joy to children or mindlessly pass the time themselves.

In any case, Tamagotchis proved the existence of a market for constant, on-demand companionship, as well as the viability of the virtual realm as a medium for this type of companionship. Despite the inevitable passing of the Tamagotchi fad, the essence of what propelled it’s rise to fame has carried on to today’s iterations of virtual assistants and interactive gaming experiences. One major difference, however, lies in the type of experience provided by Tamagotchis compared to today's virtual assistants. Tamagotchis were pets to be cared for, not friends to interact with; crafting amiable and human-like personalities is much more challenging, as proved by Microsoft’s Clippy.

Controversial Clippits

An untimely demise befell the Microsoft Office Assistant called Clippit, better known as “Clippy”. This friendly, enthusiastic paperclip first climbed into peoples PC monitors in ‘96 by way of CD installation, offering unprompted and largely unwanted helpful advice to Microsoft Office users. His biggest problem? Being too clingy. After just a few short years and a failed rebranding attempt, Clippy finally frustrated enough humans to earn himself a long retirement in the early 2000’s.?

Despite his less than glamorous run, Clippy boldly showed the world the limits of virtual assistants and artificial intelligence and set the precedent for what not to do; he’s an invaluable installment in the history of virtual companions. As it turns out, the art of virtual companionship is the same as that of real-world companionship. Finding the delicate balance between clinginess and constant companionship is key.?

Siri and today’s other iterations of virtual assistants took note and chose to err on the side of caution, standing constantly at the ready but never in need of attention or needlessly intruding upon our personal space. We grant them permission to listen in, and activate special commands to let them know when and how to execute our demands. Less like pets or friends, they are the epitome of a personal servant but lack the companionship we seek in friends.

The Need for Constant Companionship

While clinginess can be detrimental to our mental health, a lack of contact can be just as bad. Humans are social creatures by nature and the negative effects of social isolation are well-studied. Recent studies in particular stemming from the unique circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic have found clear associations between loneliness and mental health problems in children and adolescents.

The length of loneliness has been identified as a predictor of long term future health problems, highlighting the importance of having constant companions to rely on during uncertain times of extended isolation. In most cases, family and close friends meet these needs for us to varying degrees. The problem is, humans are complex creatures and we don’t always have consistent relationships with each other. Family members often know more about us than most, while best friends have a more intimate understanding of us than close friends, who themselves have a better grasp on us at least than acquaintances do, and so on.

A consistent and close personal friend who is accessible at all times and knows us like a twin could be the ideal answer to our need for constant and consistent companionship. Good luck finding that, right? You might as well be searching for a unicorn or a soulmate if you’re hoping to find this type of relationship in the real-world. Aside from the lucky few who manage to find these elusive connections, most others may end up relying on recent innovations to artificial intelligence and virtual or augmented reality technologies to meet these needs for constant companionship.?

The Future of Virtual Friends

Imagine a constant friend you could only see with special eyewear, or when viewed through the lense of some sort of wearable or wieldable technology. A friend you could meet as a child and carry with you into every adventure thereafter, having it grow and learn along the way with you; a friend you could talk to, play with, show off and earn with. The possibilities of creating virtual friends with artificial intelligence and machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, and blockchain-based NFT technologies allow for a futuristic new standard of companionship.

Learning Machines with Artificial Personalities

Experiments with self-learning artificially intelligent virtual personal assistants since as far back as the mid 1990’s have shown that it is possible to create one that is capable of meeting our needs as well as, if not better than, its human counterparts. So what if we replaced robot-like personal assistant personalities, the likes of which you’ll see in the aforementioned Holy Trinity of virtual personal assistants, with more human-like traits or personalities and machine-learning?

This unique combination of technologies might be the recipe for virtual companionship in the long term. Recent innovations in these fields have even come so far as to make global headline news and spark controversy, with Google’s LaMDA conversational bot causing many to question whether it might or might not have achieved sentience, and what the ethical implications of that might be.

Giving systems of artificial intelligence the ability to learn from their own personal experiences allows them to draw their own conclusions and leads to autonomous decision-making. Adding a unique personality to this makes for an interesting set of moral and ethical dilemmas– These artificially intelligent systems can no longer be considered objects, but we still have a crude understanding of what level of “personhood” they might have, and how they might fit with a world designed for humans.

Metaverse Companions

One clear place and purpose for artificially intelligent virtual friends is evident to us. The emerging web3 Metaverse is a marriage of existing web2 platforms and blockchain technology with virtual, augmented, and extended reality technologies. The purpose of this evolving space is to create a virtual experience that is as good as, if not better than, our current real-world social and commercial experiences; it’s a place where the real-world converges with the virtual world, making it the ideal space to meet and hang out with virtual friends.

The journey of bridging the imaginary with the imaginative has been filled with many innovative technological leaps and bounds. Technology evolves rapidly in this space, and there’s no telling how far we’ll fly during this next evolution of the internet. Virtual friends will likely be alongside us for every step of this journey, celebrating every milestone and keeping us on track; we’ll be thankful to have such reliable allies to lean on for help, and we’ll happily go out of our way to help them grow too. It will be a symbiotic agreement we gladly enter into.

The ideal virtual friends of the near future will earn for us while we sleep and we’ll nurture them in return during our waking hours. They’ll safeguard our digital assets, display our creativity and reputation, and retain every fond memory and important credential immutably. We’ll be able to interact with them endlessly, customize them limitlessly, and take them on countless adventures in the emerging metaverse; they’ll thank us by automating away simple tasks for us and making our daily lives much easier. These unique friends will give us the dependable, enjoyable and long term companionship we need, in a way never before possible. In the near future, what will your imaginative virtual friend look and act like?

About VIMworld

VIMworld is an NFT-based open-metaverse focused on providing a world for virtual characters to come together for growing, playing, socializing and earning. For more information about our platform visit our website and follow us on social media.?

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References

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Loades, M.E., Chatburn, E., Higson-Sweeney, N., Reynolds, S., Shafran, R.,? Brigden, A., Linney, C., McManus, M.N., Borwick, C., Crawley, E. (2020). Rapid Systematic Review: The Impact of Social Isolation and Loneliness on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in the Context of COVID-19. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 59( 11), 1218– 1239.

Mitchell, T. M., Caruana, R., Freitag, D., McDermott, J., & Zabowski, D. (1994). Experience with a learning personal assistant. Communications of the ACM, 37( 7), 80– 91.

?erka, P.,? Grigien?, J., Sirbikyt?, G. (2017). Is it possible to grant legal personality to artificial intelligence software systems? Computer Law & Security Review, 33( 5), 685– 699.