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The Warriors Stood in the Shape of a Heart
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a picture of Warsingers funeral. Warsinger was an in-game persona in the rather good MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot". and generally well-liked.
The real person behind Warsinger was a 32-year-old with heart trouble, who really died.
So the players on his server organized an in-game
funeral.At the funeral, players from the three realms of Camelot, who normally kill each other gleefully on sight, stood in the shape of a heart (check the pic above); the two figures in the center of the heart are Warsinger's real-life sister and girlfriend."
I play in a chat-based RPG known as A Call To Duty. It's been around for about 6 years and currently stands at 240-something players. We've seen real life marriages and births as the result of players meeting in the game. Inevitably, we've also had players who have passed away. Recently, the passing of one of our game managers was marked by dedicating a ship in his name. His family understood what the game meant to him, and they were happy with what we had done.
It's nice that in a way his funeral meant something to his friends, rather than a boring sermon from a speaker that didn't really know him.
A few years back a guy died on the field in the reenactment of the battle of tewksbury (1471).
I think of a burst aorta, possibly exacerbated by hefting a large sword around a field in 33C heat, wearing plate armour...
It wasn't until afterwards that people realised that he was really dead. They had a wonderful funeral the next day, in the nearby abbey (where many of the noble dead from the battle were buried). Thousands turned up to pay their respects, most still in kit. He was buried in the same way a respected knight would have been.
Though I didn't find out personally, I'm told that the pallbearers had a hard time holding up the coffin, as he was buried in plate.
This isn't the first time this happened. A player in Ultima Online passed away a couple of years ago and a Gamemaster created an invulnerable dolphin with his name on his home server.
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
Then I am truly sorry for you. Your experiences have been noticeably different from mine, since I've been involved with MUSHes for 8 years now (similar to MUDs, but different codebase). My cycle was one of newbie to pretty good coder to do-nothing. That's me right now. I log in to these sites still just for the friendships I've still got. I haven't written a new line of code in at least four years. But I still log in to say hello to my friends. After all, they're the only part of the whole online experience that matters. And I wish your experiences had been more similar.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Not a lot of people know this, but in Sunset Home, the zone in EverQuest reserved for customer service personnel to enjoy between answering petitions, there are a few memorials to guides (players who volunteer their time to help with the customer service) who have passed away while in the program.
/salute and /hug.
During the training session a senior guide takes you around sunset home showing you the sights, but they're always very serious and sombre around the avatars that exist in memoriam...
On the server where I was a guide for a brief time one of the guides had recently passed away so they made a special point of telling us about him and his avatar. When they would passed by they would always find time for a quick
Sorry, it's just you.
I played EQ for nearly 3 years and have some solid friendships that have come of that. More importantly, I have my wife, who I met in game. We chatted in game, then via Internet audio (Gamevoice), and then met and dated for awhile before going further.
And I'm not the only one either - a couple of our best friends met via a MUD while in college and have been married for nearly 8 years. And my father-in-law met his second wife online.
Of course, I know a bunch of people who treat relationships as convienences, and I've watched them burn people left and right both online and in real life (when they met). Mostly because they never quite got that there was someone on the other end of the pixels and they were due just as much respect as you yourself are.
I know I was honest with other people online, and so maybe that's why it's worked for me. I know our friends and my father-in-law are the same way. Because, frankly, if you don't treat others well online they're not going to trust you or treat you well either. What goes around comes around and all that.
This isn't saying to be a doormat. Nor does it mean that you can't do well in the game -- I was in the uber-guild on my server and was one of the best equipped characters of my class.
I started using IRC waaay back. Then gravitated into MUDs, good old Compuserve games, and various NGs and Forums. And I'm a frequent participant on several mailing lists.
That said, I have to say you seem to have a very jaundiced perspective when you say you've yet to meet people who are fit, eat right, talk right, and have charisma about them who play EQ or MUDs.
I have quite a few friends who play EQ or DAoC(even to the point of disappearing for an entire weekend to play). Many of them are highly paid programmers, sales support engineers, application designers, etc. People who work in close-knit real-world teams all the time. Many of them also play ultimate frisbee, softball, soccer, etc. - team sports. And a fair few have webs of social contacts that boggle my mind, and I have so many friends I can't keep up with them all.
Now, I've met some of the people you seem to think all EQers or MUDers represent... there are some. But then I've met plenty of maladjusted or poorly socialized people outside of the game world, so I have no reason to suspect a huge correlation.
Your assumption seems to be that these people are developing on-line friends INSTEAD of off-line ones. My experience has been that off-line friends get sucked into common on-lne activities and that the intersection of the on-line and off-line friend sets is high.
The Internet has allowed me to meet people in Australia, Sweden, UK, Tasmania, NZ, Spain, Germany, etc. A lot of them have offered me a place to stay when travelling. I've purposefully travelled to the US to meet many of my on-line buddies (after knowing them for a few years on-line) and real-world friendships I expect to endure have formed. Some have even blossomed into annual pilgrimages. None of that could have happened before the Internet very easily. And these aren't unhappy, poorly socialized, unfit, or immature folks - quite the contrary.
Then again, this may reflect the character of the populations of the lists I hang out on, the forums I frequent, etc. So maybe it is just a case of needing to expand your horizons?
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."