Slashdot Mirror
Nine Souls, One Body
Second Life blog/newspaper New World Notes reports on an interesting resident, wilde Cunningham. wilde is actually nine separate people on one account, all of them with physical handicaps that keep them in a care center. From the article: "We formed the man avatar first, because that day, we had more men in the group. We always wanted a female one, but we haven't taken the time to create her yet. Mary and Johanna would like that very much. We decided on how wilde would look first by starting with skin colors. We have both black and white in our real life group, and didn't want to have those because neither is better than the other. So we picked orange."
I wish they would post an explanation of stories like these. I can't go to the website because work blocked it, so how the hell am I supposed to translate this small paragraph into something tangible.
All I can say is the story itself is very poorly written, the slashdot submission equally poorly written, and the story itself not particularly interesting in any way aside from a fairly boring human interest story with absolutely no analysis or conjecture. So disabled people interact using an MMORPG barely anyone plays. Wow.
:)
I invite someone to respond and get modded insightful for explaining why this matters like I'm a 10-yr old.
*crickets chirping*
This sounds like a short story in one of the recent Year's Best SF edited by Daid Hartwell. The premise in the story is that any collection of human beings whom in themselves are deemed legally incompetent, may gain legal recognition as long as the collective posseses all the faculties of a normal individual.
Were that I say, pancakes?
pretty much standard mmo procedure. they want current members to let new players roll characters on their accounts, after which they'll promptly buy their own license if they dig the game. basically banking on the fact that many IRL friends enjoy playing MMO's together.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Never mind that it would take like 20 minutes for that collective mind to formulate a response and type it in.
My wife and I used to "team up" to solve Tomb Raider puzzles -- it was a pretty cool thing. She's spot something I didn't, or would have a different approach to a certain action sequence. We would each keep our own solo games rolling, but the cooperative game would be our fave, always.
I guess the thing I find most cool about this article is that these are nine physically disabled people who live in an institution (a care center) and they play cooperatively in a virtual world. In that world, their avatar does not have any of their physical limitations and they can do things that they simply would not be able to do in RL. It must give them a real sense of freedom. What's more, they don't appear to anyone else in that virtual world as a person (or people, in this case) with any disability.
I worked for a couple years in a care center and things are so regimented, so planned, that a variety of new experiences is really hard for people to come by. Some folks would watch TV all day. Others would live for the morning paper. Still others would look forward for an entire week to the arrival of the library lady and new books. If I brought a few old magazines in, they'd be devoured from cover to cover and passed around from room to room. These were the people who were in the best shape. You could see (and were often told as much by the residents themselves) that they had so very little control over ANYTHING in their lives, and that many felt abandoned by their relatives to a facility that was little more than a prison. The sense of hopelessness was incredible, at times.
I'm sure that whatever qualitative issues people might have with the game they play, one has to admit that nine people acting as the same avatar is pretty incredible even for people who have no physical limitations. I'm willing to bet that each of the players probably thinks about the game when they're not playing, and that they probably dream about or in the virtual world that they play in. When they motor over to the computer to log in I'm sure it gives great satisfaction to do the things they've been thinking about since their last session, or try something they dreamt about.
If you're a resident of a care center, you're treated as an object. You're acted ON -- you're fed, you're bathed, you're clothed, you're read to, you're moved from place to place -- you control nothing except your own mind. I think it's very cool that they get to control something, some representation of themselves, for at least as long as they're logged in. For those brief periods, I'm sure that the boring beige halls and walls of the facility fade away, the wheelchairs are forgotten and time flies. How cool. How totally frickin' cool.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R