Sorry to hear about your Uncle and your friend. Several members of my family have died in the last few years of cancer and it's a long painful process to have to watch, to take nothing away from their personal suffering, it is hard on everyone around them too.

I worry that the same people who crash in game funerals and make fun of articles like yours, where someone expresses true grief, are truely heartless, and that somehow the anonymity of the internet has turned an entire generation into monsters. I worry about the future if the world forgets how to care for and respect their fellow man.

Maybe the internet just brings out the worst in some people and despite the way they behave online they are still good people. I guess I'm just not optimistic enough to really believe that.

The ability to make friends in game probably differ a lot from one person to the other. But the friendship, when it happen, is as real as it can be.

When you spend years playing online games with a person you get to know things about them they dont share with alot of people because you sometimes understand each other a little better than some face to face relationships. With some of these people you may be seperated by hundreds or even thousands of miles but you share a commonality with them few people other than gamers can understand. You share in both their losses and triumphs, I have grieved for a friend of mine who lost his son in an accident, I have grieved for a friends divorce and celibrated the birth of children with others.  I have been playing online games for close to elevin years now and still play with one of the first people I friended in a PUG in Everquest.  As a group many of my friends will pick new games to try and either play or move on as a group, sometimes we loose contact for months at a time but we will eventually pick back up and continue on with another adventure.  We have gone through EQ, Diablo 2, Delta Force, CoH, WoW, Aoc, Lotro, and even a short stint in STO, I have been through more with my game friends than I have with many of my face to face friends and the few that overlap have become closer than family...

Originally posted by Altera

My old social guild in WoW lost what was pretty much it's grandad, the oldest person I have ever met in any game, he was in his 70's and one of the kindest people you could ever meet, he was also lost to cancer.  The guild leader and his girlfriend (good personal friends of mine still as we all raid together in a different guild now) were lucky enough to go to his funeral and meet his family, his daughter was good enough to get in touch with them as he had talked about them such a lot, they founded the guild together back at the beginning when WoW was known as vanilla...I guess that gave them a special kind of closure that you didn't have and in a way, they were there for the rest of us too. 

His account still exists, they keep it running, I don't think anyone could bear to see anyone with his char name, I know none of us could...it's like a memorial to him now.

Just thought I would share my own experience :)

 

Same guild, same post I was going to make /wave

We also had similar problems with people who were newer to the guild not understanding.

when it clicks, it clicks. doesn't matter how, when or where.

You know, it's funny when people say things like you didn't actually "know" them, so it shouldn't be a big deal. If you think about it, how well do we know the people we supposably know? (Just because you have face-to-face contact doesn't mean you know anyone's true intentions) Aside from that, the only good memories I have on MMOs are shared with other gamers. I don't think I can play and MMO and have no sort of social interaction (for that I'd just play console games). While I've basically let go of MMOs, I feel like I've gain true friendships (people that even years after I stopped playing and we still frequently chat). With that said, I'm sorry for your lost and I hope your post can show people that friendships can be obtained through different means and still have value.

This brings back memories of a lost friend for me too ... years ago i spent a lot of time playing Grand prix legends online against folks from around the world .. not quite a role playing deal since we all knew a fair bit about each other which helped build real friendships but it was a real shock when one of us  was diagnosed with cancer and was dead within a month ,,, even tho we'd never met in person, it hurt just like losing any other friend.

Guess the virtual world is realer than we realise sometimes

I'm sorry for your loss. *Hugs* It's always devestating to loss someone we love or care about. I also can't say I've lost someone online due to death in RL. What I do know is no matter what even if you can't perform a funeral or a memorial for that person in game it might not seem like much but there are friends that will be of comfort in game even if it's not physical they can still  give words of comfort to help you thru your grief. I've never lost someone in game but i've dealt with situations that left me sad or hurt & I've always been able to turn to my friends for support. Words of comfort & support can mean so much even if that person isn't there to hug you in RL. Although I agree sometimes it's nice to have hugs in RL as well cause sometimes both are needed.

I remember in the early days of DAoC when we learned that a well-known player on our realm had died in a car crash. The GM of our server arraged a memorial service and literally hundreds of people from all three realms would gather in the frontiers. We couldn't communicate between realms, so we just all payed our respects in silence. It's sort of a sad memory, but at the same time it was also moving to see this sense of community. I am not sure that could ever happen in 'modern' games.

Numerous psych studies (most noteably Yee, 2006)  have shown that regular MMO players find their online friendships as satisfying as their real world friendships. I have met more than a few of my online frineds in real life. They are on my facebook page, we send each other emails. One great thing about MMORPGs is that you can make friends with people who may have very different religuous, political or  social views than your own. You can meet people across the world and form bonds and inside jokes no matter who they are or where they live. Doctors, lawyers and janitors can all be friends. It's kindy like a great utopia where everyone spends most of their time killing things or making things >.>

I know also what you mean. There was a guy in my guild who had a lot of problems. I didnt get closure as because of not really knowing much about him. I was never able to find out what happened to him, he simply stopped playing.

I've made a fair number of friends online. I almost put that in quotes, because I don't really feel as though you truly "know" someone or can befriend them until you actually meet them and get the full measure of who you both are. However, with the advent of Teamspeak, it HAS become much easier to get to know people and get a better idea of who you are dealing with. It's not perfect, of course, but it's a far cry better than just typing as a means to get to know someone. I feel for Jaime, and anyone who loses a friend to a tragedy like cancer. I also know that if certain people were to pass away in some of the games I've played in my life, I would miss them dearly and the game would be forever altered by their loss.

I read this, and the only thing in my head is "A person is a person after all, a person is a person no matter how small"

yay Dr. Suess

What an exquisite, beautiful piece. 

I've seen a lot of death as a medical professional.  I'm also reaching the age now where I'm starting to lose a few high school classmates, and my parents are in their 'golden years', and I've lost nearly all of my grandparents.  I have a younger sister who was just diagnosed with a serious case of cancer a couple months ago, so I share some of your pain in that arena.  It is a horrendous diagnosis not only for both the person suffering it but also their friends and family. 

I've lost a couple online friends, too.  In these cases, they were both people I'd met on some forums, and a family member started a thread giving us the sad news, and the threads quickly turned in to lovely memorials as people poured out their feelings. 

My online friends are no less important to me than my "Real Life" friends.  Friends are friends no matter where we are blessed to find them--as next door neighbors or behind a monitor in a completely different country.  In fact, some of my online friends are closer to me than my 'real life' friends, and I've met several of them when I've gone to different conferences around the country. 

Having voice chat programs like Skype or Teamspeak helps further these interactions. Our common interests in gaming and our ability to share gaming experiences help cement those friendships.  We should cherish these online friends just as we cherish our real life friends.  We may make a difference in the lives of our online friends in ways we might never know.  I've had some people tell me I'm their 'forum mom' and they like me better than their real mom.  It's both an extreme honor and heartbreaking at the same time.  Sometimes we make a difference in a very real, tangible way.  An online friend came to a group of us on Skype and indicated to us that he was attempting to commit suicide.  We had enough information to be able to call 911 in the city where he lived, and I talked to the dispatcher while the others frantically did research so we could give the police all the information we could.  The paramedics and cops found him in time. 

Sometimes, all we can do is just be there, as you were for your friend, Naga.  I suspect she played so much because it took her mind off how she was feeling, let her do something fun, and gave her a way to interact with people without fear of what people would think about how she looked or felt.  The fact that you have decided to honor her memory by supporting cancer research is wonderful and is a testament to how much she touched your life.

I agree that there is no easy way to grieve in-game.  We often are playing with younger people who simply don't  have a lot of experience with death, and as a result they tend not to have as well-developed social skills for handling that as someone who's seen a lot of it.  As our gaming population grows older, however, I think we're going to see death happen more often.  We'll be breaking new ground in this facet of life, and there are bound to be bumps in the road as customs develop.  I think it's fine to have an in-game memorial service or funeral service, but I also understand some people are going to crash it because they think it's some kind of morbid fun.  I also suspect some of those people are making fun because they're too afraid to face the reality of the end of life, and joking covers up their fear.  The only suggestion I can make is to go to one of the more remote areas of the game and publicize it only to those who knew the departed.  That's easy enough to do on a private guild website or by PM on a much larger forum. 

I hope everything works out as peacefully as possible for your uncle and your family.

Originally posted by eludajae

If you think about it the virtual world extends to the real world around us, we text eachother on our phones, talk to distant friends on our phones and these are the "real friends" but we sit in game many have voice and other times we use Vent or something simular, and these friends are our "online" friends. Lots of our "real life" friends we see less than our online friends. So really a friend is a friend period. The medium by which you communicate, phone, email, over a pizza, or in an MMO isn't the point. There are no virtual friends and real life friends, there are just friends. And when you lose one its a loss that you feel no matter what happens. But I also like to look at the half empty cup and call it half full, I still have other friends and hopefully I will make a few new. Never to replace the ones lost, but new friends to tell our little online legends about them when we were online together, there is nothing more theroputic than sharing a "no shit there we were" story with a new friend about a friend that passed on.

 

Great points, Eludajae!

I have been saying this for years. I met my husband playiing an MMO. I met the other significant person in my life playing City of Heroes. Friendships that started online often extend into the realms of reality.

There is no "virtual" world. Online is a form of communication. Just because the digital data of the online venue can be manipulated to simulate 'worlds' does not mean we have created anything. It isn't like you are using some dimensional portal to step into another reality. It's a mode of communication just like Eludajae pointed out - like texting someone, calling someone, or even (for the older crowd) pen pals. 

Putting that in perspective proves that yes, the friendships are real. Behind every keyboard and monitor is a real living, breathing human being. Granted, the mode of communication makes it easier to be misleading as you have a certain measure of anonymity. But I have found that the 'for real' people - the good ones, are exactly the same either online or when you finally meet them in person. You have people who are phony, no matter how you meet them. You can find good, honest friends online. Becoming friends with them is no different than if you'd met them at any other social function - say a garden club or at the gym. You can care for someone regardless of what method you use to communicate. My husband and I carry on about 75% of our marriage via cellphone (thanks, Verizon, for having free member to member calling or we'd be too broke to pay my CoH subs, hahaha). His  job requires him to travel to where he is needed. Does that mean our marriage counts for any less than a marriage where both people live in the home and are only away from each other for a few hours on some days? Of course not. So why should a friendship where distance separates be any different? It ISN'T.

Originally posted by Kwansei

Numerous psych studies (most noteably Yee, 2006)  have shown that regular MMO players find their online friendships as satisfying as their real world friendships. I have met more than a few of my online frineds in real life. They are on my facebook page, we send each other emails. One great thing about MMORPGs is that you can make friends with people who may have very different religuous, political or  social views than your own. You can meet people across the world and form bonds and inside jokes no matter who they are or where they live. Doctors, lawyers and janitors can all be friends. It's kindy like a great utopia where everyone spends most of their time killing things or making things >.>

Well I'd call it more of an equalizer - it allows people who would probably never interact otherwise to meet and become friends - but I see your point.

Jaime, beautiful piece. I'm sorry for your losses. I've met plenty of great people in MMOs, even complete strangers who I've come across (not in my guild, kinship, corporation). For the communities in some of these MMOs, that's a real feat, but it just goes to show that there's good people everywhere. In a way, I'm almost more comfortable when I'm not having direct contact with a person while I'm talking to them. There's that shield of anonymity - they can only see what you choose to type or how you choose to act. Yet I still pour out my feelings to my closest online friends, and I really don't feel like they're just random "online" people.

Again, nice article. Thanks.

The old Plato attribution:  'You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation'

I'm an old enough fart to remember folks who kept up for years with one another by writing an extensive series of letters.  There was a friend of my parents who spent most of WWII writing letters to the sister of one of his buddies:  They met after the war, and after the first face to face get together, they decided to get married.  

This is not that different from the online MMO experiance.  The good people I've met online have been good in person, and the bad ones, well...vice versa.  You can't learn everything about them, but according to Plato, you can discover a great deal.

That was a touching article, even though I did not understand your point. You write about very human topics and you look at them with a virtual versus real world distinction. But at that level, that very distinction seems to dissolve.

Let me explain my point of view. It is moving for us to see fictional characters die. We know they are not real and it still works all the time. Maybe we are sad because we anticipated more adventures with them. Now look closely: does this resemble what is happening when real people pass away? You sometimes hear relatives and friends close to the deceased talk about the unused potential, the dreams he had, all the things she wanted to do.

The marvel seems to be that we can move our mind into other peoples heads, be at different places, different times and see different perspectives. That is how media and MMOs work in the first place. The people we meet are not different than characters in a novel. At that level, it doesn't matter if they are "real" or if some bot or author conceived their dialoges. And they are not less real than real people, as a strange matter of fact. 

So we do not literally move our mind around. Conversely, we do "emulate". People, real or not, are emulated by our brains. That is "knowing" them. You have a mental model of everyone you know . And this is not less real than the real person. Because the "real person" from a scientific point of view is made of the very same material.

So while I am getting philosophical again, I'd say that it IS virtual. But our empathy is virtual too. I therefore disagree with the idea that we have to proclaim virtual relationships as "real" to make them serious. Because face-to-face and physical contact is a completely different matter indeed. Or put differently, if you love someone as a person, it doesn't matter if the person is physically present, because at that level the body is just "interface". Otherwise schmalz phonecalls wouldn't work and all that (to be clear, humans still need their bodies in relationships for ... certain things ... and the extra senses help feeding the mental model, but they don't need it to emulate other people and to feel empathy, consider paralytics).

I like to add that "keeping someone in your heart" is probably that: they are really still around, as the "emulation" is still running for some time until it fades away (gets simpler) due to lack of feedback loops. At the end, the emulation is very simple and consists only of few sentences, pictures and some iconic moments. If you want to be (truly) immortal, you have to be famous as "better" emulations of yourself keep running even if the prime strange loop you are is no longer around. For some it's equally important to get famous as to have have kids. Interesting that the memes of a person wants to live just like the genes.

I am old enough to have lost a lot of friends in RL.

A friend wheather in real life or in the virtual world is a treasure.

When I was playing EQ 1 I met this person while camping orcs in the commons.  We started talking between spawns and became friends.  We would meet up and play together whenever we were both online.  It really made the game fun.  This went on for about a year.  Then they just did not log on again.  I dont know what happened to them.  The character they played was a female human.  I never knew if "she" was a female in RL as that never came up. 

Later when I played EQ 2 I saw her standing in one of the cities and I ran up to her and tried to start a converstion but she never responded.  I then realized that it was a NPC with the same name she used in EQ 1.  Every time time I went through that city I would see her standing there.  It felt like someone had twisted a knife in my chest everytime I passed by.

I sure wish I knew what happened to her.