Hey, how about paying people to become your friends?

I have only so much free time, so after I picked up City of Heroes again, I have barely watched anime. Also, there have been slim pickings of late, at least that could even vaguely interest me. This past weekend, however, I took the time to watch a couple first episodes. One of them stood out.

The one that intrigued me was Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, (“I don’t have many friends”) where episode 1 was about a high school boy and girl who realized that they were both completely lacking friends. In fact, none of them even had any idea how people made friends in the first place. The girl had an “air friend” (like in air guitar), the boy had thought he had some friends in the school he went to before, but he hadn’t heard anything from them since, so perhaps it had all been one-sided. Says the girl: “You could pay people to be your friends. Like 1000 Yen [$10] to be your friend in school for a week.” The boy rejected this out of hand, comparing it to paid love.

I think she had a great idea there, although the story did not follow that thread. In these times where more and more jobs disappear because we find better technologies, many people go without work. At the same time, there are needs not so easily met by machines. I have noticed that much of emotional advertising plays on people’s want to be accepted and surrounded by friends. So why not pay people to be friends? It should not be so well paid as to keep the skilled workers out of the workforce, but it must be better than just paying people to sit at home and drink beer. Instead, they could drink beer at some gathering place, being social with lonely people.

The most realistic alternative, however (at least in the beginning) is online friends. I mean, you have all kinds of online services, so it is not a big jump. You could have professional chat room hosts, for instance. Professional guild officers in online games. In fact, you could perhaps make a new type of online games that were more social and less violent, and that came with such hosts from the start. How about “home party online”?

Would people pay for this? I think so, if they were not shamed about it. I mean, people pay for porn and phone sex, which is much more shameful. It is not very demeaning to log on to a web site that hosts imaginary home parties, where you mingle with other online guests and professional hosts. Obviously there would need to be ways to deal with troublemakers, but it being a paid service would already go some way toward that.

Actually, it probably already exists, even if I can’t remember having heart about it. If you can think of something, it exists on the Internet – if nowhere else, it exists in Korea. But I don’t know Korea, and probably never will. But given that they have the world’s largest Internet gaming company (NCSoft), and the world’s greatest broadband density, they probably have thought of it. Now it is our turn. Not that I particularly volunteer or anything. As Adam Warlock once said when he was roleplaying Christ: “My friendship is free and must be freely accepted.” But your friendship may vary.