Caleb Booker

In January 2008 I blogged about the funeral of Stanley W. I still get emails about the machinima I took of it at the time from a wide variety of people, from researchers to film fest organizers to just random curiosity seekers. Death is interesting, and digitized death even more so.

Here’s the video if you hadn’t seen it. Forgive my “first day with Fraps” camera work.

I’ve since discovered that this wasn’t the first time an online funeral had been attempted by any means. Take the following video, where a group gathers in World of Warcraft back in early 2006 to mourn the real-world loss of a fellow gamer and friend. It didn’t exactly go as planned though: a group called “Serenity Now”, hearing about the proceedings, thought it was a fantastic opportunity to catch a bunch of opponents unprepared. Mayhem ensued.

What do you feel about that? Bookmark that emotion for a second, we’ll come back to it.

Try and remember that back in 2006 many were having a very, very hard time taking virtual environments seriously. Two factors were at work in people’s minds:

1. It’s all just a game, a toy, a plaything. Anyone acting too serious is really just asking for it. Being serious is for idiots.
2. Hey, we’re here to play the game! I’m seriously here to play this thing! Anybody not playing the game is interfering with my goals that I’m justifiably pursuing. Seriously, they deserve to be punished.

Funny how happily contradictions about seriousness can live together in people’s minds. When all of this was fresh and new, just a few years back, these were understandable perspectives because they brought the comfort of “being right”. As we all know, there’s nothing in the world people who spend a lot of time online like more than being right.

At the same time though, remember that feeling you bookmarked about this. Those people were mourning the loss of someone special to them. For real.

Back in early 2008 I wasn’t completely certain I understood funerals, but I’ve been to quite a few since then. I’m starting to understand the need to say goodbye properly, the need for the ceremony, the trappings, the event and the monument. I’m starting to understand what it is about closure that we’re all getting through the process.

So it was with these thoughts tonight that I sought out the original cathedral I had filmed machinima in just over a year ago. While I didn’t find a thriving v-funeral parlor business, I did find this:

That’s Dharma Austin’s grave. She was a friend of mine. Apparently, she died in March. I didn’t know.

…

So here I am standing at a gravestone… well no. No, what’s really happening is that I made an avatar walk up to a 3D graphic of a gravestone that’s clickable and contains some text about someone I’ve never actually met, not for real. None of this is real…

Well, what is? I mean, skipping the hackneyed existential argument about the nature of reality for a moment, the fact is that I’m really, really glad that gravestone is there… wherever the hell “there” is.

Standing there is important. It gives me a place to be, even if it isn’t a real place, to think what I need to about this. Now I can get through all the hard work my mind has to do, reminding myself to take better care of my friends, and how important every stupid moment we spend together is, how monumental a thing it is to joke around with someone for an hour one Friday afternoon, and what a precious thing life really is…

I need this gravestone. How the hell am I supposed to make sense of any of this without it?

God… even now I’m struck by how strange things have become…

Posted on May 14th, 2009 under new media. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.