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.

翻译：大型多人在线游戏（MMOGs）能够促进社交互动和关系建立，但也带来了特定的隐私与安全挑战，尤其是在协调亲密人际联系的背景下。为了探究潜在风险，我们对《最终幻想 XIV》（FFXIV）玩家在社交媒体上寻求亲密伴侣的帖子进行了案例研究。我们利用潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）主题建模和主题分析方法，分析了一个公开微博账号中的 1,288 条帖子。我们的研究结果表明，玩家会披露敏感个人信息并分享脆弱性以建立信任，但在跨多个平台管理身份和隐私方面面临困难。我们还发现，玩家对亲密伴侣的期望是多元化的，期望的不匹配可能导致隐私泄露或情感剥削等问题。基于我们的发现，我们提出了旨在降低隐私与安全风险、促进虚拟世界中更健康社交互动的设计启示。