A SECOND LIFE resident has spent an entire evening attempting to continue a conversation with a woman called Sophie, unaware that he was actually speaking to seventeen entirely different women sharing the same name.
The incident occurred on Friday evening when Ryder Nightfall, 43, arrived at a popular Second Life nightclub and struck up a conversation with a woman called Sophie. After discussing music, the weather and how long they'd both been in Second Life, Ryder wandered across the dancefloor, where he encountered another woman called Sophie and naturally assumed it was the same person. Over the following three hours, he repeated this mistake fifteen more times, gradually constructing what investigators have described as an extraordinarily complicated relationship with a woman who did not actually exist.
Initially, nothing appeared particularly unusual. Ryder learned that Sophie lived in Australia, worked in Germany, had recently moved to Canada and was considering relocating to Brazil. Although he found her international lifestyle somewhat difficult to follow, he assumed she was either extremely well travelled or employed in a profession involving a considerable amount of air travel. His suspicions were briefly raised when she appeared to have three different accents within twenty minutes, but he attributed this to voice morphing.
The problems began when Ryder attempted to resume a conversation about Sophie's car, asking whether she'd managed to get it through its MOT. The woman, who lived in California and had never heard of an MOT, responded with understandable confusion. Ryder apologised and immediately asked whether her new puppy had settled in, only to discover that she was allergic to dogs. Rather than question whether he was speaking to the correct person, Ryder concluded that Sophie was either extremely forgetful or had been lying about owning a Labrador.
"I thought she was a really interesting woman," Ryder explained. "She seemed to have lived everywhere, done everything and had an incredible number of different experiences. Admittedly, some of the things she told me were contradictory, but I just assumed she had a complicated life."
By 10.30pm, Ryder had congratulated Sophie on a promotion, expressed sympathy over a relationship breakdown and asked whether she'd managed to sell her house. Unfortunately, these conversations had taken place with three different Sophies, none of whom had any knowledge of the other two. When a fourth Sophie informed him that she was twenty-two and still lived with her parents in Denmark, Ryder began to suspect that she had been considerably less than truthful about her previous marriage and property portfolio.
His confusion was compounded by the fact that all seventeen women were wearing black, had long dark hair, extensive tattoos and profiles containing some variation of the phrase "I don't do drama". Several had almost identical mesh heads, five possessed the same butterfly tattoo and three had profile photographs featuring a woman sitting on a motorbike. Ryder later admitted that he had briefly wondered why Sophie kept changing her clothes, although he assumed she was simply demonstrating an unusually extensive wardrobe.
Club staff first became aware of the situation when Ryder approached a Sophie from the Netherlands and asked why she'd suddenly started speaking Dutch. The woman explained that she was Dutch, prompting Ryder to ask why she'd previously told him she was Brazilian. When she denied ever having visited Brazil, he accused her of deliberately trying to confuse him before apologising and suggesting they forget the whole thing.
"I genuinely thought I was having one long conversation," Ryder said. "Every time I saw the name Sophie above someone's head, I assumed she'd just moved somewhere else in the club. I thought she was teleporting around a lot, but people do that in Second Life."
Matters deteriorated when Ryder attempted to resume a supposedly flirtatious exchange by telling one Sophie that he'd been thinking about what she'd said earlier. When she asked what she'd said, Ryder replied, "You know, about us," prompting the woman to inform him that their only previous interaction had involved her asking him to move because he was standing inside a speaker.
By midnight, Ryder had become increasingly concerned about Sophie's apparent inability to remember anything she'd told him. She had variously claimed to be single, married, divorced and engaged, owned somewhere between zero and four dogs, and appeared to have changed occupations from nurse to graphic designer to supermarket manager in less than an hour. On one occasion, she had apparently aged twelve years between conversations, something Ryder attributed to the notoriously unreliable lighting in Second Life nightclubs.
In desperation, Ryder began asking deliberately vague questions such as "How's everything going with that situation?" and "Did you manage to sort that thing out?" Unfortunately, this only made matters worse, as each Sophie assumed he was referring to an entirely different personal crisis and began providing lengthy updates on events he had never previously heard about.
The situation finally unravelled when Ryder received an IM from Sophie asking whether he'd like to continue their conversation somewhere quieter. Delighted that the evening appeared to be progressing, he accepted, only to receive a second invitation from Sophie approximately thirty seconds later, followed by a third Sophie asking why he had suddenly stopped replying.
Ryder initially suspected a technical fault before discovering seventeen separate IM windows, all containing conversations with women called Sophie. A closer examination revealed that he had spent three hours distributing personal information, compliments, questions and increasingly confused expressions of sympathy among seventeen entirely unrelated people.
Despite the ordeal, Ryder insists he has not given up on finding love in Second Life, although he has decided to avoid women called Sophie for the foreseeable future. He has also vowed to pay closer attention to display names, keep track of conversations and make absolutely certain he knows who he is talking to.
Determined to put the experience behind him, Ryder returned to the nightclub on Saturday evening, where he met a woman he described as funny, intelligent, attractive and refreshingly different from anyone he'd encountered the previous night.
The pair reportedly spent two hours chatting, discovering several shared interests and agreeing to meet again the following evening. Friends say Ryder is cautiously optimistic, particularly as he has made a point of remembering her name.
"It's Luna," he explained. "Lovely name. Quite unusual, too. I really think things might be different this time."
There are twenty-three of them. Standing in a line.