{"id":27,"date":"2008-03-12T00:33:34","date_gmt":"2008-03-12T07:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faithmile.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2008-06-27T10:16:06","modified_gmt":"2008-06-27T17:16:06","slug":"spiritual-beings-fleshly-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Spiritual Beings, Fleshly Bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article on msn.com called “Jerks of the Web<\/a>” 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story is about a World of Warcraft player and her friends.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In real life, she became sick from either a stroke or cancer, and she died.\u00a0 Her family and friends had a funeral for her, but her in-game friends also wanted to honor her memory.\u00a0 Many of these people played online with her, but had never met her in real life and lived very far away from her.\u00a0 They decided to honor her by having another funeral for her inside the game.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The deceased had a favorite place within the game, and it is inside a “pvp” zone.\u00a0 Since that was her favorite place inside the game, her guild members and friends decided to hold her funeral there.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One group of people from an opposing guild used this opportunity to ambush the funeral and kill all of the unarmed characters.<\/p>\n

The ambush didn’t prevent the players from continuing the game, the avatars can be regenerated after being killed.\u00a0 However, a debate raged about whether or not the actions of the opposing team were disrespectful or not.\u00a0 The event is posted on YouTube, so it’s easy to read the reactions regarding the players actions.\u00a0 I read through several pages of reactions and they are mixed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 As we venture into cyberlife, I think this becomes more evident.\u00a0 For instance, in the funeral situation, a real woman died.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 The in-game character was either an expression of her, or an expression of who she wanted to be.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Is it “just a game” when the people behind the characters were aware of a real death and chose to ambush the memorial anyway.\u00a0 Would it be different if the woman remained alive but chose to kill off her character and stop playing the game?\u00a0 Would it be different if the characters at the funeral were computer-generated and there were no actual people behind them?\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Do the interactions with the woman’s character “in spirit” count as much as interactions others had with her in flesh?\u00a0 Do her cyber friends that knew her “in spirit” mean as much as the friends she had in flesh?\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Perhaps it is our actions in the cyber world that will force us to define who we are in the real one.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cyberlife","category-loving-thy-neighbor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithmile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}