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."

Comments

Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Weird

[Golias]

The jist (rather than pasting in the entire text like a total Karma whore):

A group of nine residents in an assisted-living home, some of whom completely unable to operate a computer on their own, all of whom are wheelchair-bound, but none of whom have mental disabilities, created a Second Life character with the help of a person (a resident, IIRC... I just skimmed most of the story), who turned them on to the idea and controls the interface for them.

Pretty much everything the character says and does is decided by a consensus of these nine people, including the look of the character itself (a big bulky guy with orange skin and red hair.)

From the article, it sounds like they were a pretty tight-knit bunch before they even started playing this game, which probably makes it easier for them to cooperatively roleplay a single avitar.

Poorly written...

[b0r0din]

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*

Re:Poorly written...

[Golias]

One thing that's slightly interesting is that it's a "person" who is making every decision, including who to be, by committee.

It's also interesting that what these nine people settled on as their chosen compromise was something rather eccentric and quirky. Most people would expect the moderating force of nine people agreeing on everything to result in something rather mundane, rather than a big orange hulk with red hair.

The presense of wilde in the game presents the other players an opportunity to interact with a character which has a sort of collective mind. That's sort of unusual. If I played that game, and my character meet "wilde", I would probably want to spend some time talking to that dude and figuring out what the heck the deal is with him.

Sci-Fi story

[belg4mit]

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.