Occasionally, when I’m just browsing online, I’ll stumble across something I really want to write about, but because it’s more than a few days or weeks old, I’ll be reluctant to do so. That was the case when I stumbled across the story of a WoW funeral being crashed.
A player died in real-life, and her online friends decided to honor her in the only way they could find to do so — they held a funeral in the online world that they’d shared with her. While they were doing this, a guild from the other faction raided the funeral, pretty much destroying what the gamers had intended as a solemn memorial service.
Supposedly, it was a PvP server, and they’d apparently chosen a PvP zone, as well. The choice of a PvP server seems to have confused some people, but it really shouldn’t; WoW isn’t the sort of game where you can switch servers at will, and that was the server they’d been playing on. The choice of location is probably just a sign of their naïveté. I’m honestly surprised that any Horde players would trust the Alliance to be respectful of anything. The only place it might have gone off without a hitch would’ve been in one of the major Horde cities.
Still, while the raiders were jerks, I’m not concerned about this specific incident (it’s well over a year past; my being concerned about it now, since I didn’t know the player in question, is kind of silly). What I’m more interested in are the questions it raises. For example, how real are the relationships we form in virtual worlds? Is it appropriate for players in these virtual worlds to bring real-world tragedies into the game?
For several weeks at the end of last year, I worked on a project with people in Montana, Wisconsin, and Maryland. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I spent more time talking to and working with those individuals than I spent with most of the people who work for our company here in the Charleston office. Obviously, the fact that I never met most of those individuals face-to-face did not make our working relationship any less real, so distance doesn’t define a relationship.
If it’s not the distance, is it the fact that most of their interactions were in a game that makes the relationship seem less real? I have friends who I rarely see anymore. When I do have the chance to interact with them, it’s usually through Xbox Live. Sometimes, we get to talk while we’re playing. Other times, the only real interaction we have is playing the game itself. Does that make us not friends? Of course not.
Some people believe that it’s inappropriate for them to have held a memorial service inside the game world. There are two very different stances held by those who feel this way. One group says that it’s disrespectful to the deceased to have a memorial service in which the deceased and all of the mourners are represented by computer generated characters. The other group thinks it’s disrespectful to the other gamers; gaming, they say, is a way to escape the harsh realities of real life, and bringing a funeral into the game world is an unwelcome intrusion of reality into their game.
I’ll address the second group first, because it’s the easiest to refute. Assuming this wasn’t a RP server (and even then, it’s just more muted, I’m sure), the claim that there is an expectation that reality won’t intrude into the game is simply absurd. When I was playing WoW, it wasn’t uncommon to “hear” people talking about school or work or whatever. Life intrudes everywhere; escapism is never perfect, and if you weren’t a part of this group, it is extremely unlikely that the memorial service would impact your gaming significantly.
Is it inappropriate to memorialize someone online, within a game? What we have here is a group of people who wanted to honor a friend that many of them likely only knew online. I’d be willing to wager that the group assembled here was scattered throughout the country (if not the world), and that attending a local funeral was simply not really an option for most of them*. They held their memorial service in what they felt was the best way available to them.
Compare that to the continuing existence of Acidman’s blog. After his death, the blog was maintained (with old posts being automatically reposted) in order for people to read, in accordance to his wishes. It’s an online memorial, maintained (as I understand it) by those who knew him primarily as an online presence. Or, what about the various tributes to Steven Malcolm Anderson? These men were remembered and honored on blogs by people who knew them and loved them primarily through those blogs.
Is it that much more unusual for people who have loved ones that they knew, primarily, through a game to use that game to honor and mourn them with mutual friends? Suppose that these had been football players; if a teammate died, and the team asks, at their next game, for a moment of silence, would we mock them for that? What if they held a service honoring their lost teammate during half-time? It isn’t disrespectful to use the forum where you interacted with a loved one most often to pay your respects to that loved one; even if the forum in question is an online game.
As clichéd as it may sound, the internet has changed the shape of the world for many people. It allows us to work, play, and interact with people that we would very likely have never met otherwise. I think that we, as a society, are still figuring out exactly what that means, and the concept of online memorials and such is just one aspect of the change.
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* Even if they’d been able to attend the local funeral service, would they have been welcome? It’s been my experience that many people think that online relationships aren’t “real”, and these relationships were online gaming relationships. I could very easily see family and friends who’d known this gamer in person being somewhat put off by the attendance of a medium-to-large group of people who knew her only through her character in an online video game.