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This week, I saw something that caught my attention. A group of players (a guild that calls itself Serenity Now) in the online fantasy role playing game (commonly referred to as an MMORPG) called World of Warcraft (WoW), attacked a player-organized funeral in game, slaughtering the attendees avatars, all while recording the romp and posting a video of it on the internet. The video has incited a barrage of comments from many kinds of people, gamers and non-gamers alike, both for and against the attack, and, interestingly enough, the funeral itself, like:
BLAHAHAHAHAHAHA I don't think I have laughed this hard in a long time. Props to the clan… whatever they call themselves, funeral crashers. God bless their funeral wrecking hearts!
And
Absolutely disgusting, these kids are the types of kids that pull columbine stunts. Go outside and make some friends rather thank killing some poor girls funeral. … you are all gross human beings.
At face value, one would see the arguments as mutually exclusive (i.e. if you are for the funeral, you are against the attacks), but why can't these views co-exist? The way I see it, both events (the funeral and attack) have their place in the fantasy world and, in the context of that world, should not be condemned at 'inhuman' and 'unnecessary,' but heralded in the fanbase of WoW as events that highlight the creation Blizzard has entrusted to five million of the earth's population.
A funeral is a ceremony for honoring the life of a fallen comrade. Putting them in their final resting place. In games like WoW, where the player's avatar dies almost constantly, funerals are rarely considered, as they can take almost trivial steps to bring their characters back to life. All that is required is returning to the spot where you died, and pressing resurrect. Because of the powerlessness of death in the game, most funerals would be of little significance. Also, many people would get tired of having so many funerals, especially if you had a lot of people who weren't very good at the game in your group.
However, in this case, where the actual player dies, the avatar (for the most part) will not return. Since the controller is dead, the avatar has finally felt the sting of permanent death. This final demise of the avatar, one that cannot be reversed, lends itself to a funeral, or other memorial service, by the avatars peers (who, are often friends of the player in real life) as is the nature of role-playing games. The role of the friends of the avatar is to see that their friend is honored in death, as she was in life.
Now, being a role playing game, other players are playing the roles of their avatars. And since WoW is a game based on several earlier games, it has already amassed quite a bit of back-story. One piece of lore that is touted heavily through the game is the fact that the Alliance hates the Horde. And the Horde hates the Alliance. On PvP (player vs. player) servers, much of the allure of playing is to take control of an avatar and destroy the opposing faction. And when you see or get wind of a opportunity to bring shame and humiliation to you enemy, you normally take it.
So, when the members of the guild, "Serenity Now" found out the enemy was going to be having a funeral for their fallen comrade, they used the opportunity to bring them a big cup of shame and humiliation to their enemy, by obliterating them. While not exactly respectful to the dead player, it was respecting the lore of the game, and to what Blizzard has created.
While, on the outside, the actions of Serenity Now may seem despicable to some, with a bit of back-story and some creative reasoning, we see that, with regards to the game, and the roles the players choose to play, having, and raiding, an online funeral for a deceased player not only makes sense, not doing it is almost as much of an offence.
