More On The MGS Suicide

Last Thursday we mentioned the misreporting of a gamer's suicide, the death of a young man who frequented a Metal Gear Solid forum. This week, GamePolitics tries to clear things up by talking with one of the forum admins and giving gamers a place to air their reactions to related events, such as Jack Thompson's callous disregard for the young man's life. The Guardian Gamesblog comments on the unreality of the situation: "According to Gaminghorizon, AFP, the international newswire service that picked up on the Bulgarian story, has corrected its take on the events, although news sites that picked up on AFP's original version, including CNN and Yahoo have apparently yet to make alterations to their reports. Ultimately, the lack of major international media coverage has lent this sequence of events an air of unreality, of illegitimacy. A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online."

Comments

Deaths on Servers

[eldavojohn]

Having played online games and posted in a few forums, it's clear that most people actually care about others. Usually online communities seem to be pretty closely knit groups of people, otherwise you wouldn't log on to them--kind of makes sense.

If this young man committed suicide, he obviously needed a close group of friends which would explain why he would log onto the forums. Perhaps he was looking for someone to talk him out of it and he couldn't find anybody anywhere else? After RTFA, seems like he was a daily poster on the forum.

There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them. I'm reminded of Luckky Johnson on the Scylla server of Star Wars Galaxies. She battled a serious illness in real life and her character (that was logged on at all times) was suddenly never on anymore.

I Suppose this is just another effect of social networks based on computer networks through the abstracted level of the internet. Will it ever be "ok" to be concerned about guildmates or people you play online with? Right now, everyone seems to treat "meeting online" as a social stigma ...