Essay topic

(Working) Name of the essay will be "My best friend might as well be an NPC". In the essay I will form some thoughts on character-character relationships within games, offline as well as online. Many a researcher has done extensive digging in the online communities of games, but I want to add some flavor by inserting the question "How do I play my game; on what premises and for what purpose?" thus involving BOTH social sides of the topic as well as describing how immersion lets the player experience non-player characters and drama (or not). Hopefully this will shed a small light on a topic hitherto mostly concerned with social exhibitionists. (This will probably get to the question of how games build on character/objective "relationships")