faithMile

An article on msn.com called “Jerks of the Web” highlights the fact that our cyberbehavior is often worse than our real life behavior and that anonymity may be a factor in that. One of the featured stories involves a rather convoluted situation that brings up questions of real life vs. game life, real vs. fake, ceremony and solemnity vs. humor, and cultural situations vs. rules of life. 

The story is about a World of Warcraft player and her friends.  A girl, or young woman, played World of Warcraft (called “WoW” by enthusiasts), played WoW a lot and was part of a group, or guild.  In real life, she became sick from either a stroke or cancer, and she died.  Her family and friends had a funeral for her, but her in-game friends also wanted to honor her memory.  Many of these people played online with her, but had never met her in real life and lived very far away from her.  They decided to honor her by having another funeral for her inside the game.  There are several places inside WoW where people can gather and not be attacked, and other places are “pvp” zones (player-vs-player) where attacks are frequent and are to be expected.  The deceased had a favorite place within the game, and it is inside a “pvp” zone.  Since that was her favorite place inside the game, her guild members and friends decided to hold her funeral there.  They posted their plans in several in-game forums inviting everyone to the service and asking for people who chose not to attend to respect the service by not attacking.  The avatars (characters) in the game normally wear elaborate costumes with weapons and armor, but for the funeral they appeared in formal outfits that did not allow for weaponry, and were therefore defenseless.  One group of people from an opposing guild used this opportunity to ambush the funeral and kill all of the unarmed characters.

The ambush didn’t prevent the players from continuing the game, the avatars can be regenerated after being killed.  However, a debate raged about whether or not the actions of the opposing team were disrespectful or not.  The event is posted on YouTube, so it’s easy to read the reactions regarding the players actions.  I read through several pages of reactions and they are mixed.  Many people pointed out that the players gathered in a wargame, in a war zone, and were unarmed, and announced that they would be there, and therefore “asked for it”. Many were also flabbergasted that people would hold a funeral inside a game.  Some believed it was just a stupid idea, while others believed that funerals were somber occasions and holding one inside a game would be disrespectful.  Quite a few posters stated “it’s just a game!” and didn’t believe the ambush was wrong at all, while others remarked that it should have been treated as a funeral because the actual player died, rather than simply retiring a character.  Many spoke of a “fake funeral” while others remarked that a funeral was simply a way of memorializing a person and so even inside the game, it was real and should have been respected.

As a Christian, I was taught to believe that we, as humans, are primarily spiritual beings inside fleshly bodies, and that when we die, our bodies will decay, but our spirits will live on eternally in God’s kingdom or outside of it.  As we venture into cyberlife, I think this becomes more evident.  For instance, in the funeral situation, a real woman died.  Her friends in the game may not have ever seen her – only seeing and interacting with her game character – but they knew of her personality because of the way she interacted inside the game.  In essence, even though she played a character, there was probably a lot of “her” in it because it was a character she chose and designed (rather than an actor playing a preconceived part in a movie, for instance).  The in-game character was either an expression of her, or an expression of who she wanted to be.  The people in her guild interacted with her personality, or the “spirit” of who she was, even though they never got to know her in flesh. Is it right to say that the in-game funeral was “fake” when they were honoring the memory of a real person?  Is it “just a game” when the people behind the characters were aware of a real death and chose to ambush the memorial anyway.  Would it be different if the woman remained alive but chose to kill off her character and stop playing the game?  Would it be different if the characters at the funeral were computer-generated and there were no actual people behind them?  When in a cyber-world, should people, or their characters, act based on the rules of the cyberworld (it’s a war area, so we should ambush) or base on the rules of the real world (it’s a memorial for a human, so respect it as if you would in real life).  Do the interactions with the woman’s character “in spirit” count as much as interactions others had with her in flesh?  Do her cyber friends that knew her “in spirit” mean as much as the friends she had in flesh?  Do the actions of the ambushers count as game actions (game flesh) or should we consider the psychological ramifications of wanting to ruin someone’s memorial (in spirit) and hold them accountable in that way? How much does it actually matter that real humans were honoring the death of another real human, albeit in a cyber world?

I think that we, as humans and as Christians, will have to contend with these types of questions as video games and gaming takes over as a primary form of entertainment.  Perhaps it is our actions in the cyber world that will force us to define who we are in the real one.

As many of you know, there have been about 12 fires in Southern California over the past few days.  The San Diego area was hit really hard, and almost a million people have been evacuated from their homes.  As a compassionate gesture, several San Diego area hotels have offered discount rates to evacuees.  That’s great, right?  According to an economics professor, it’s horrific. Mark Steckbeck, economics professor at Hillsdale College, laments the fact that hotels offered discounted rates to fire evacuees in San Diego on this post of his blog, The Liberal Order.  According to Steckbeck, who doesn’t sound very liberal despite his blog title, the hotels made a bad thing worse by not charging full market rates or more for the rooms because higher prices would have insured that only the most desperate used the hotel rooms while others would have opted for shelters or family homes. Steckbeck says “It was a nice gesture on the part of the hotels, but I’d rather see compassion administered through the invisible hand of market prices.” Technically he is correct regarding the economics, but he is completely wrong concerning compassion.  Market prices are passive.  They do what they do, like a machine.  Compassion, on the other hand, is active.  It cannot be administered by the invisible hand of market prices.  It cannot be administered by any passive force.  Compassion means to suffer with, and market economics don’t suffer.  They don’t feel.  They cannot administer justice or mercy.  They just are.  Compassion is the realm of people. So how does human compassion reconcile itself with market forces?  This IS the market. The owners get to charge what they want, and the owners decided to be compassionate. That’s the great thing about the economy and the market. If one is fortunate enough to make one’s riches and own something, one is able to be merciful at will. As for the people who may have been willing to pay more for a room, it doesn’t matter.  When almost a million people need to be evacuated, the rooms would have filled up anyway and the compassionate gesture of reducing prices didn’t do any harm at all.  What did happen, and what will happen, is that when the fires are over, those who still have homes will return to them and those who need the hotels for longer than a few days because they no longer have homes, will have locked in reduced rates while they look for other semi-permanent housing. The hotels are still more expensive than rent, so some people will rent apartments until the insurance company, FEMA or whoever comes through with money to either buy elsewhere or rebuild. Either way, the hotels in the area were only half booked before this happened and now they are all full, so the hotel owners were able to be compassionate while still making a profit.  Isn’t that the best sort of economics?

I’m taking a class at church about the changing culture and our role in it as Christians.  Traditonally, Christians treat non-Christians as “others” and try to evangelize them.  This class emphasizes finding common ground and building relationships rather than blunt evangelism.  In the last session, we had to get into groups and one of us had to ask a difficult question that a non-Christian may really ask, and the others had to answer.  My question was basically “See Darfur?  How can there be a loving God?”  Another guy had a question about why Christians are so non-chalant regarding global warming.  Another wondered about death.  As we talked about our subjects, I realized something.  Crisises of faith are a Godsend.

I know that most Christians would tell you that having a crisis of faith is the worst thing ever.  Once you become a Christian, doubting is no longer an option.  Just believe God in all things.  I get that.  It’s comforting.  But I have found that I end up closer to God when I allow myself a full-on faith crisis.  For instance, I have actually asked God what’s up with Darfur and how could he be loving and allow that to happen.  I have even wondered if he was really there at all.  Is this world and what we make of it really all there is. Does he see what’s going on there?  Does he care?  I mean, honestly, I really want to see someone get struck down by lightning over this!  I honestly wondered if I could worship someone who could let those things happen.

The thing is, I dared to question my faith and my worship of God because I know that my love for him is a choice.  Not that God isn’t worthy of my adoration, but I have to give it freely or it isn’t real.  I would rather ask God about Darfur and ask myself if I wanted to worship him with the world being in this state and him letting it happen, than to blindly give my devotion for no apparent reason.  I still love God and I have continued to love him through really difficult circumstances.  He has promised not to ever leave me, and I plan to stick around with him, too.  Oddly enough, my faith crisises force me to reason everything out and account for my faith in a way that blind devotion doesn’t, which ultimately brings me closer to God, not farther away.

So what does this have to do with evangelism?  A LOT.  When non-Christians ask us questions and we give some pat answer from “Church 101”, they know it’s fake.  I think the thing that bothers them about us is not so much that we believe, but that it seems as if we are so bent on the next life that we truly stop caring about this one.  It seems as if we don’t think about things like whether the war we are in is just, why things like Darfur happen and what we can do, or whether we should try to stop global warming.  I think they would listen to us more if we would actually allow ourselves to ask the question “where is God in all of this” and then allow him to answer.  It also helps to admit that we wrestle with that question and that sometimes God doesn’t answer and we just don’t know.  Non-Christians are people who don’t believe in Christ.  They aren’t stupid.  They aren’t children.  For the most part, neither are we.  We should be able to relate as adults and find some common ground.

You know what?  That faith crisis that non-Christians exist in and Christians avoid, where we ask “God, where are you?” is possibly the most common ground of all.