Have you guys made any friends over the Internet? I know I have.

I once wrote a letter for Electronic Gaming Monthly about women gamers not being given enough credit. I think it appeared in August 2000. Unexpectedly, I began to receive all these e-mail letters from people I hardly knew --- mostly Americans. Almost all of them thought that I was female. Looking back, I bet they were looking for an easy girl just because I happened to write to EGM.

One of them was different though --- one of them was an actual game girl from Cincinnati. Let's just call her Sarah.

We began writing each other over the course of months about anything at all --- what games we wanted, what we were doing over the summer, what we were busy with, how things were with her boyfriend. Looking back, I still have to ask myself what she thought of little old Filipino me. Eventually we "moved on to better things" --- the last letter I sent her was dated this June. Never got a reply from her since.

The Internet is quite a bad place for getting to know total strangers. I know there are all these common-interest sites --- you know, those like PinoyExchange or MSN Chat where you get to meet people who happen to be in the same college as you are, or those who you agree with on trivial things such as shades or shoes --- designed to bring all us strangers together. But they can only go so far as to initiate contact. Both parties have to be mutually interested in keeping tabs with each other.

It's funny how something that brings people together isn't working as well as it should.