Life is beautiful strange and its end is filled with mysteries, shadows and the truest knowledge of our unknowing. Dummie Beck’s recent death and the feelings and responses it evoked has left me thinking, grieving (for someone I didn’t know that well, even), and confused.
November 26, 2007 at 12:47 am
The question of avatar ownership tickles many threads to be tugged. I would hope that our use of virtual worlds leads us more to our humanity, and thus, to our sharing our being-ness with others across the spatial now. The evidence I have gathered, subjective as it is, tells me that my closest ones perceive me behind the veils and channels, and than another would only fool those not really human.
Not that I haven’t thought of other modes. When I began describing SL to those in meat-space I told them to imagine a soap opera that is immersive; where the characters are also the writers and the audience. In that thread of thinking, I then imagined a super-avatar, one for which a team of writers, fashion consultants, language coaches, designers, and others converged creativity and strategy to create an über-personality.
As I think of being human, I think of Grandfather in the movie Little Big Man, who referred only to certain members of his tribe as “human”. I speak of the possibility of SL, or anything else, helping us to evolve our humanity when I also feel we may have already surrendered it and rendered it to the genteel beast of post-industrial zombie-ism. How many of us can pass a Turing test of the soul? How do you know, a co-worker asked last week, that you are really interacting with actual people “in there”? If the three vehicles were able to complete the DARPA challenge, how hard could it be to make an avatar that passed for one with a human running it?
I have found myself in way of life where I have adapted this so-called modern life and mode of surviving, at least up partway up the ramp of Maslow’s needs, but I find myself isolated by a series of logical conclusions. SL has brought me into a new level of human interaction. Death is part of that. SL is not perfect, but it short-circuits some of the insulation our way of life has as side-effects. As I sat looking at my screen knowing that a couple thousand miles away, my beloved friend was sobbing as he grieved Dummie’s passing, I wanted nothing more than to hold that real person in my real arms. So far, that interaction seems irreplaceable by our technology.
March 22, 2008 at 6:36 am
[...] thinking about this, I found unexpected meaning in his death, and in the response of the community, writing: I believe that one of the powers of virtual worlds is that it gives us a new toolkit of creative [...]
June 28, 2008 at 6:57 pm
[...] Talamasca in the Second Life Insider. The other is an incredible article by Dusan Writer called “Death in Virtual Worlds: Play, Magic, Grief and the Search for Meaning.” Now I am hoping that you don’t take this conversation as something morbid. It is no more [...]