The Real and the Semi-Real
A member of a WOW guild suffered a stroke in real life and died. Her guildmates, knowing her only through the game, but nevertheless wanting to offer some remembrance for one of their own, decided to hold a memorial service in the game. A rival guild decided that would be a great time to show up and kill everyone. Hilarity ensued.
Now, is it sort of creepy and vaguely sad that a group of people elected to hold a virtual funeral? I'd say so. It lends a depressing weight to the stereotype of basement-dwelling gamers who can't function in the real world. In my opinion, it trivializes the real loss that this person's real-life loved ones feel. But saying gamers aren't the most socially adept subculture isn't going to surprise anyone, and the fact is, these people did have a relationship with the deceased, however unorthodox. You can't criticize someone for feeling grief simply because they haven't met the deceased in the physical world.
[..]
Is killing a person's avatar the same as killing a person? Of course not. It's not close. But it does have a real effect on that person. You are inflicting suffering upon someone else, even if only putting them through the tedium of building up another character. We have ways to describe people who get off on inflicting suffering on others. One of them is "sadistic." Another is "evil."--Joe Rybicki --The Real and the Semi-Real (1up.com)
2 Comments
Leave a comment
Recent Related Entries
Famous Programmers From Adleman to ZimmermannLook who's up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper:Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler,...
Josh Harris: "Pseudo was a fake company." - Boing Boing
I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris's Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote "Parasites on the Internet." Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke:I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a...
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Wired:The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we...
Writing Style for Print vs. Web
Jakob Nielsen:Print publications -- from newspaper articles to marketing brochures -- contain linear content that's often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use. In print, you can spice up...
Inside Google Book Search: U.S. copyright renewal records available for download
Inside Google Book SearchFor U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are...
It's like he said later in his article "The important distinction here is that for many (perhaps most) players of MMORPGs, the game is just a medium for socialization."
Just consider this - who do you think you would feel more grief for dying, your occassionally obnoxious neighbor next door who you rarely talk to but have met "in person", or someone you've constantly gamed online with for the last year?
Well put, Will.