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| Thread: This made me cry.. | |
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bjorn190
Responsible
Supreme Hero
Jebus maker
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posted January 27, 2003 03:24 AM |
bonus applied. |
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This made me cry..
A Story About A Tree
I'd like to tell you a story about a tree.
This tree grows in a different virtual world than Ultima Online--one of the many text muds that exist on the Internet. It grows in a Garden of Remembrance, and the ground around it is littered with flowers and boxes of chocolates and pieces of paper with heartfelt poems written on them. And there is a plaque there as well--"In memory of Karyn," it reads.
The story I'd like to tell is the story of that plaque and that person, someone I never met.
Karyn first logged on to that virtual world quite some time ago. She was from Norway. She kept coming back, and brought friends with her--some of whom did not speak English very well, but for whom she served as an interpreter. She made friends. Eventually she ran a website all about that virtual world, and posted on that site pictures of herself, where all could see she had a lovely smile.
As her ties to the world grew, she started a guild. She called it the Norse Traders, and with a lot of hard work, she got it off the ground and developed it into one of the most popular and well-known guilds in the game. It was a merchants' guild that also adventured together, and pretty soon the folks involved had made good friendships.
In March of this year, some of those friends started to notice that they hadn't seen Karyn in a while. You know how it goes in the online world--people don't leave, they just fail to show up, usually, and you never know what happened to them. But in this case there was her website to go to. So people went looking for Karyn.
A day later the news filtered out across the bulletin boards, via emails, and eventually onto the welcome message when you first logged in: Karyn was dead. She had died in a head-on collision while test-driving a new car. And it had happened two months before, in January, and none of us had known.
Her parents knew that she had friends on the Internet--they didn't quite understand what she did online, or who those friends were, but they knew that there were people out there somewhere who might want to learn the news. It took them some time to find her webpage, and to learn how to put a message up. But they did it, and they attached news items about the car crash, in Norwegian.
The outpouring of grief on the virtual world was immediate. People who had not logged on in months heard about it from the game's email newsletter. A memorial service was organized. And eventually, a Garden of Remembrance was created, and a tree planted in Karyn's memory. Players made the pilgrimage to the garden in order to leave tokens of their grief. Code was changed so that items left in this manner became permanent parts of the world.
Throughout all the events, however, there ran a common thread. People could not get a handle on feeling grief for someone they had never actually met. They could not quite understand feeling a deep sense of loss over someone they "just played a game with." When describing their loss, they had to resort to "I once formed a party with her and we went into a dungeon." They couldn't quite express the feeling that a member of their community was gone.
And it was that sense--the Norse Traders had fallen apart since January, and now they knew why. Because Karyn, the person at the center of it, was not there. In a very real sense, they came to realize that the strange unease they had felt about hearing of her death with a two-month time lag might have originated in the fact that the loss to the community was actually felt when she stopped logging in--not when the news finally came.
In the end, that garden and that tree served not only as a memorial to a well-loved and much-missed person, but as a marker of a moment, a moment in which the players of an online game realized that they weren't "playing a game." That the social bonds that they felt within this "game" were Real.
There's a children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit, about a stuffed plush rabbit which desperately wishes to become Real. And in the end, the love of the little boy whose toy it is makes this come true.
In the end, the social bonds of the people in a virtual environment make it more than just a game. They make it Real. Sometimes it takes a moment of grief to make people realize it, and sometimes people just come to an awareness over time, but the fundamental fact remains: when we make a friend, hurt someone's feelings, suffer a loss, or accomplish something in an online world, it's real. It's not "just a game."
Ultima Online was designed with a basic philosophy in mind: that we were providing an online world, one that could live and breathe and develop in new and unpredictable ways. We wanted to provide scope for players to develop online communities in a way that no other online world had done. It is amazing and gratifying to see some of the results today: volunteer police forces, roleplayer taverns, small-scale Olympics, and fledgling forms of government. And yes, sadly, a few places where funerals have been held, for in any community of this size, there will be losses.
The thing that we should never lose sight of is that we, by participating in this new sort of community, are breaking new ground that will undoubtedly prove important over the next decade, as the Internet acquires more significance in business, education, socializing, and other areas outside of gaming. The dilemmas that players of UO wrestle with every day in the form of how reputation should work, what to do about harassment, etc, are the key problems of virtual reality for the next several years. And we are only able to tackle them because you, the citizens of this virtual Britannia, are more than just players--you are a self-aware community that reaches beyond "game" and into the Real.
I am not going to let anyone tell me that the Garden of Remembrance isn't Real, or that the grief we all felt over Karyn's death was not Real. And I hope that UO players aren't going to let anyone tell them that their experiences within UO aren't Real either, that it's "just a game." It may be for some people, but we all know better, don't we? For Karyn's sake, and also for our own.
This little essay is based on a speech given at the last Austin UO Players Lunch in March. Also, taken from this page: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/essay1.html
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Sir_Stiven
Honorable
Legendary Hero
banned
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posted January 27, 2003 06:25 AM |
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wow first time in a long while a thread in here got me thinking...
Just deleted a long written post, i just started off with just typing down my thoughts about it but it became so much and didnt make much sense.
Guess i outta think more about this before posting... but it is a scary thought isnt it...what if something happend to you, or an online friend of yours...wouldnt you like them/yourself to know what has happend? I would like to anyway, because i concider many of my friends i talk with online as really good friends. Maybe not many from zone/HC but from other places.
I remember when my comp crashed for about 5 days, and my mailbox/ICQ was filled by messages asking where i was and if something had happened. Being missed is a great feeling, no matter if it comes from a person you know from RL or online...after all, there are a person behind all those computers too =)
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Valeriy
Mage of the Land
Naughty, Naughty Valeriy
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posted January 27, 2003 09:27 PM |
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Volunteer police forces in an online world... it strikes me as ridiculous that people avoid being responsible for the real world and take responsibility for a virtual one.
Although I know that a website can make a difference to real people if they got noone to talk to that can understand.
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You can wait for others to do it, but if they don't know how, you'll wait forever.
Be an example of what you want to see on HC and in the world.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com
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Vadskye91
Promising
Supreme Hero
Back again
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posted January 27, 2003 10:38 PM |
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I say give him a QP. That was a great story!
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Knowledge is power...
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Snogard
Known Hero
customised
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posted January 28, 2003 09:09 AM |
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I'm sure there are people here that I'll miss when they stop posting or I stop visiting for some reasons, even though I don't really know them and may have never even "talked" to them in private. I guess both "RL" and "Online" (or whatever) are just as real as we imagine it to be. 
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Seize The Day.
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Celfious
Promising
Legendary Hero
From earth
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posted January 28, 2003 01:20 PM |
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It is sad about Karen, her comrads & guild members.
I want to play everquest, or UO even more than before.
To bad my lan administrator dosnt permit software instalations :|
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What are you up to
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Dingo
Responsible
Legendary Hero
God of Dark SPAM
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posted November 19, 2003 01:24 AM |
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That was a good one, it in my opinion is Qp Material. Qp needed!
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The Above Post/Thread/Idea Is CopyRighted by, The Dingo Corp.
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted November 19, 2003 04:25 AM |
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Hexa
Responsible
Legendary Hero
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posted November 19, 2003 10:48 AM |
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Well decided back then not to hand out a QP for it because it was kind of copied from another site.
But since we have softened up on the requirements for a QP here ya got one Bjorn!@ 
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If you want to realize your dreams >>> you have to wake up!@
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tigerangelz
Known Hero
Angelic Tigress
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posted November 19, 2003 03:38 PM |
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That was truely a touching story of how real-life/internet friendships/feelings can run so deep.
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Wolfman
Responsible
Supreme Hero
Insomniac
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posted November 20, 2003 02:59 AM |
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That was excellent. There are people here that I wouldn't mind meeting in RL, then again there are people here that I would never like to meet. It really is amazing how well someones voice is picked up in just written words.
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Dingo
Responsible
Legendary Hero
God of Dark SPAM
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posted November 20, 2003 03:11 AM |
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Quote:
then again there are people here that I would never like to meet.
Hehhe, I have a slight clue of who that is.
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The Above Post/Thread/Idea Is CopyRighted by, The Dingo Corp.
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Wolfman
Responsible
Supreme Hero
Insomniac
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posted November 20, 2003 03:23 AM |
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I don't think you do.
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GracieMae
Adventuring Hero
Lady of Leisure
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posted November 20, 2003 03:53 AM |
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*sniffles*
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The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.
Not all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
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