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.

Death in a virtual world reminds us of that beauty, that strangeness, and brings with it mysteries and loops, magic and expression, and a form of grief that carries translucency and power.

It’s hard to find words, but then they’re always insufficient to death and dying.

We cry and then try to find the words that express the sensation of our tears. We rage, and seek its expression in angry words, confounded by our fears. We remember, and try to find something that will keep those memories true and clear.

Death and grief have always occupied a place in virtual worlds. In talking about the case of Miss. Norway, Raph Koster commented that death in virtual worlds often serves as a reminder to the community left behind that it is real with a capital-R. An essay/eulogy he wrote at the time for Karyn “describes the friendships that Karyn made in the game and the difficulty players had in articulating the grief they felt over the loss of someone they had never met in real life. The Garden of Remembrance, in Raph’s view, marked a defining moment in the consciousness of the online gaming community:

“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.” (Salon)

Others have followed this thread. For example, a post from 2003 comments on the grief caused by virtual death.

In March of this year a virtual graveyard/memorial sim was reported on at Reuters.

I’ve found myself touched, grieving, and trying to make sense of which of my reactions are to the facts of death itself, and how those reactions are coloured and changed by its impact on virtual worlds. I find myself circling from the personal to ever-broadening rings, but they almost all bring me back to questions of my own relations to death but more importantly to life and to the living.

Death and the Absence of Symbols
Death in a virtual world has me thinking about their definition, one key attribute of which is that they’re persistent. Virtual worlds do not disappear when we turn off our computer. They persist without us. And this is one of the defining characteristics of what makes a virtual space a virtual world as compared to a computer game, for example.

As Castranova pointed out, the fact that these worlds are presistent, combined with their virtuality, introduces a strange dynamic to the economics of those worlds. Namely, unless it is coded into the system of the world, things do not disappear, degrade, wear out over time. If I am a swordsmith, I do not have a guaranteed market for my swords based on people needing replacements, unless the system codes their degradation or loss. One of the balancing acts that game designers must work through is how to make sure there is enough going OUT of a world (NPCs buying quest loot, for example) to keep an economy stable and to prevent MUDflation, which would happen if the supply of swords simply kept growing and growing.

But what about avatars and virtual worlds? There are very few virtual worlds where avatars grow old, get sick, go to the hospital, and, well, die. And what happens when there is a disconnect between the health and vitality of an avatar and the real health of the person behind that representation?

We can also expect a day where avatars become valuable. And as worlds become increasingly used as places to learn, work, and live – extensions of our real selves. We will also face a day where our avatars might be inherited by the next generation, or might in fact persist beyond our deaths. There is something disconcerting about seeing an avatar appear as “coming online” when the person behind the avatar is no long alive – a relative, maybe, clearing out the account, taking care of some unfunished business of some sort.

When we die – will our avatars die as well? Will our avatars die without us? When, in passing, our relatives visit a virtual world and meet our friends there – while assuming the persona of our formal virtual selves, what will that experience be like – for them, for the friends of the deceased? What words will we use to describe these experiences? How commonplace might they become? As worlds become more real, how will we cope with the layers of meaning, grief, sadness, and perhaps closure?

And prior to death, what symbols do we have to mark the progress of someone’s decline? Will people start to invent new symbols if the people behind the avatars become ill? Or will deaths be marked by a few text hints and then a sudden disappearance – equating death with sudden car accidents, pointless seeming.

We are able to grapple, to a degree, with death because it comes in many forms, and some of those forms include symbols and a process – hospice for the dying.

The struggle to create meaningful symbols and to grapple with how a person’s decline and death is represented through their avatars will become an increasingly important thing to understand and a source for creative ways to express what is often quite visible in life.
 

Identity, Trust and Truth
But just as the Magic Circle must be protected and respond to threats and change, it also needs to strike a balance around issues of identity and trust.

My belief is that issues of identity will be one of the profound social issues of our time. I say that in the broadest possible terms but these issues of identity will partly arise because issues of avatar identity may drive new discussions about national identity, reputation, social systems, and personal narratives.

The concept of the Magic Circle is that a boundary should exist between what is play and what is ‘real’. Literally, in sports, it is the field of play. In games, it can be the rules of the game. And in virtual worlds, it encompasses systems wherein the spaces are protected from incursions that would upset the philosophy, story, and code that makes these spaces.

The lines blur because virtual worlds are increasingly less protected from the outside world because real economies are represented within them, and in some worlds the design is to mirror the real – thus becoming less like places of play and more like creative commons or sand boxes. A sandbox has a boundary, and you can create little games within it, but at the end of the day a sandbox is not a game, it’s a place with the tools to make a game happen but whether we create a game in it is entirely up to us.

In the case of Dummie, I’d guess that the community represents a venue for play more that it does a group of people running businesses and making stuff (although these are elements as well). And if by definition effective play is governed by the need to protect a magic circle, it begs the question of how much protection of identity and anonymity is important to the protection of that circle. These questions of identity and anonymity can’t be taken lightly, as covered in much of the academic literature on games and play. The sacrifice becomes when the Magic Circle is threatened – participants agree to protect anonymity and to establish trust on purely social grounds. The risk becomes that it is easy to feel threatened. The social circle, the magic circle, must become protective of its own.

I imagine over time that new tools and new rituals will also arise around identity – some of them hard-coded, and some of them through experiences like this. Is there a need to know the ‘real’ behind the avatar? If we create personal attachments how much risk is there that we lose our sense of trust and the power of magic if we can never be entirely sure about the reality of what we are told is real?

I imagine a time of identity escrow accounts. (I’ve already changed my own will and powers of attorney to include instructions on the use of my avatar). The ability to turn identity details on and off, to shade them out for certain groups and make the accessible to others, is not far off.

But I also think that we will come to grapple with a different issue of identity – namely, that we will form new language around what a ‘person’ is. What’s interesting about avatars, and what speaks to my idea of recursiveness and the strange loop, is that they are both ‘run’ by a real person but that also that they in some very true sense exist a priori.

Many of us equate the avatar with a user, a one-to-one relationship. But what happens when one avatar is run by more than one person? What happens when one person has more than one avatar? Does an avatar’s death merit grieving when we can’t be sure of a one-to-one relationship?

Death, when we see it in a simple one-to-one situation in a virtual world opens up the strange sensation that there are circles within circles of meaning. Not only do we grieve a real person who has died. We can also grieve the avatar as a separate individual. The two circles may overlap, or they may not, and we may increasingly start to feel that it may not make much of a difference – what matters is how well we know the person who is gone.

When someone dies, virtual worlds remind us that the person who is gone was many things to many people. To some he was a son. To some a lover. To some a friend. Avatars remind us of the multiplicities of our identities – and the death of the person behind an avatar reminds us that all these roles are just that – roles, for behind our masks, illusions, and ways of relating to the world we are fully human, and with hope we are whole.

Death and the Magic Circle
After Dummie’s death, there was a magnificent response from the community he was a part of. While I think it partly shows the strength of one particular community, I was also struck and deeply moved by their ability to remember, express their grief, but more importantly to heal the magic circle that is so beautifully woven about them.

One evening I went to Nemo Beach and found a gathering around a picture of Dummie with photos and candles, flowers and music. What moved me was that they were gathered in a literal circle, and I was struck by the parallel to the magic circle of play that is so important to theories of games and fun.

Somehow, the community symbolically rebonded and tried to heal the sense that the magic circle is fragile. To create visible icons and symbols and a shared experience that allowed the participants to reaffirm the circle – the connectedness and protection that its members tried to give to each other in order that their sense of being within a magic place could be preserved.

This also calls to mind the question of what makes a Magic Circle vulnerable – and certainly events from the outside can be worse than those from within. Changes to code, terms of service, regulations, or (in this case) death, could all make the magic circle vulnerable. How a community reacts and creates resillience and how it responds to threats to the circle of magic is one of the marvels of any community, and in virtual worlds the tools and the language that is used in this process can be sources of great power and mystery.

Magic and Meaning

Death has happened before in virtual worlds and will again. The tools, process and rituals of death are different, and in fact what we grieve may be different too, but none of it is less than real.

I believe that one of the powers of virtual worlds is that it gives us a new toolkit of creative expression. Through this toolkit we might find new strength, community, and archetypes. The fluidity of identity, the shuttling of meaning back-and-forth between our real and virtual selves, and the ways we learn and communicate all create a fertile ground for new discoveries.

I’m fascinated, for example, that command-and-control organization structures don’t work as well in virtual worlds as they do in corporate environments, and wonder whether the age of the feminine corporation might be around the corner – collaborative, nurturing, supportive, and emotive.

Each little event, each build, each project, and each monumental thing, including death, hints at a different stream of thinking, a different way of knowing – I’m not sure new things are created, but I’m sure that in some ways these experiences remind us of deeper, simpler truths.

We pass on. The world mourns in its different ways. And the world persists. And in that persistent world little traces of us are left behind until the sea comes along and washes those traces away. But their disappearance does not negate the importance of having lived, and if we are lucky, the importance of living fully.