Honey Trap or Romantic Utopia: A Case Study of Final Fantasy XIV Players’ Intimate Partner-Seeking Posts on Social Media

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can foster social interaction and relationship formation, but they pose specific privacy and safety challenges, especially in the context of mediating intimate interpersonal connections. To explore the potential risks, we conducted a case study on Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) players’ intimate partner-seeking posts on social media. We analyzed 1,288 posts from a public Weibo account using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and thematic analysis. Our findings reveal that players disclose sensitive personal information and share vulnerabilities to establish trust but face difficulties in managing identity and privacy across multiple platforms. We also found that players’ expectations regarding intimate partner are diversified, and mismatch of expectations may leads to issues like privacy leakage or emotional exploitation. Based on our findings, we propose design implications for reducing privacy and safety risks and fostering healthier social interactions in virtual worlds.