The Glitz Pit: Parasocial Friendships in the Information Era

by John McAtee

I’ve always been a lurker. I’ve spent thousands of hours in strange corners of the internet since I was a kid who barely knew how to read, absorbing the myriad scribblings of strangers in an attempt to satisfy some sort of greed for content. I never posted—the idea of having strangers see something I wrote gave me a level of fear only matched by death and deep space gamma ray bursts. But I liked to read.

When I was still in elementary school, I stumbled upon a Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door message board while looking for tips to get past a certain boss level. Instead of an answer to my question, I found a strange insular community that called themselves “The Glitz Pit.” Ostensibly a forum for discussion about a well-loved section of the game, The Glitz Pit had evolved into a popular place for players to create and roleplay as their own characters from within the Paper Mario series, and post about their personal lives, or whatever else happened to be on their minds.

Child-me was hooked. I was amazed by the ability to peer into the lives of these mysterious strangers. Over time, a core group of nine or ten posters emerged, and grew closer and closer together. In the same thread, a teenage boy could ask for relationship advice while simultaneously working on his Koopa’s finishing move. The friend group was eventually forced to move to a secret board by overzealous GameFAQs moderators, and I followed—but they didn’t drift apart yet.

Through years in real life, I followed the posters of The Glitz Pit. Eventually they dropped the name and roleplaying altogether, becoming a place for friends to simply hang out and talk about video games. I stayed along for the ride, reading everything I could, archiving it in parts of my memory that might have been better used for times tables and articles of speech.

Even though I was just a lurker, it began to feel like I was part of the community myself. At one point, I started to think of the various accounts as old friends and checked in on them every day to see what happened in their lives. I heard about a boy’s first kiss and his first breakup. I read about a girl’s struggle with her manipulative family. I visited a man’s website as he tried to succeed as an amateur Java developer. All throughout I never interacted, out of a fear of disturbing the natural beauty and reverence I had for this place. I just watched.

As time went by, less and less posts appeared on the secret message board, and I grew old enough to have my own group of friends that I could message whenever I wanted. I didn’t need the dopamine fix from lurking as much as I used to, and I began to check in on my one-way friends less and less. At some point, I stopped completely. I banished memories of them from my mind until a sudden rush of nostalgia years later brought them back to the forefront.

Each and every member of The Glitz Pit had gone on with their lives. I’m sure some of them graduated college, got married, had children—possibly all of the above. Maybe some died. It struck me that perhaps there were other lurkers like me, who created the same parasocial relationships with these anonymous gamers. We’d never know of each other’s existence.

Places like The Glitz Pit don’t really form anymore, at least not that I’m aware of. Incredible advancements in technology have made it impossible to think of a question that can’t be solved by the first page of Google, or even the second, in truly dire circumstances. In our modern era where you can see millions of words on any topic you desire with the click of a button, there’s no more need to stop and smell the digital roses; there may not even be any digital roses left. 

I still lurk, but it’s evolved to aggregate sites like Reddit, where the constant stream of media makes it impossible to see a specific commenter more than once without actively stalking them. I haven’t found any more tight-knit groups of total strangers because, why would you ask some random online nerds for game advice when you can find thousands of GameSpot articles on the subject instantly? I read dozens of Reddit posts a day, then read the thousands of comments that typically boil down to “good submission” or “bad submission,” more digital imprints that will quickly fade from my mind only seconds after I see it. Frying my brain with the endless streams of bullshit on sites like these is the only way I’ve found to deal with a small itch inside me, a need to be human and know others while also dealing with crippling social anxiety.

I think there is an epidemic of loneliness in our society, particularly among Generation Z kids that have never known a world without the Internet. It might be why YouTubers have been so successful as a group–they allow viewers the chance to imagine that famous people are your best friends, that they can be beamed directly into your home and bring you along for their adventures. Maybe the fearmongering from Protestant Luddites was true and the advancement of technology has permanently rewired our brains to crave content above all else, replacing any forms of true interpersonal connection with those that exist online. Despite the ability to connect with almost anyone across the world instantly, I feel more isolated than ever.

Recently, I decided to track down the secret message board, just to satisfy my curiosity and maybe get some sense of closure on this weird part of my childhood. I made a few wrong turns, including ending up on a message board for a Commodore 64 game called “Hellhole” that’s become a hotspot for sinophobic Coronavirus discussion, but I was finally able to find the place I wasted countless hours of my youth scrolling through. There was only one post from 2020, and it had zero replies, published only a day before I had the idea to look back.

I’m still around, but he’ll never know.