Digital immortalization

Death is a specter that haunts everybody throughout their lives.  Sometimes it may seem like it's everywhere--in our personal lives, in our jobs, in the news--and that's because it is.  It is an inescapable part of life, though everyone deals with it in their own way. Often times for myself, it's hard to even fathom the concept even when it's one of the few single experiences that every human being will eventually share and has been since the beginning of time.

I apologize for wanting to write about such a somber topic, but the recent theater murders in Aurora, Colorado as a result of one cowardly person's actions have sent my brain into a tizzy.
Understandably, this is a topic that people might be soon tired of hearing about due to the news cycles that the continuing story has become trapped in. However, it is an incredibly important event to pay attention to, if only for the sole reason of realizing the fragility of life and the ease with which it can be stolen away by the greedy claws of random chance and human weakness. Lives that were taken away in such an unfair, unexpected manner: while they were watching a goddamn movie on the opening night, for Christ's sake. Some of them could possibly have been waiting years for it; some of them could have just been dragged there by their respective significant others; pretty much all of them were there to escape from the awful realities of the world, at least for a little while anyway.

It's that concept of escape that makes the story so tragic. It's something that I think about from time to time, as I'm sure many people do--especially when horrific events like this arise.

So much of my life is spent on escaping reality, or trying to invent new ones.  Video games, movies, music, writing, joking with friends, making fun of bad overweight Latino comedians via Twitter from the safety of my own home; all of these things are a kind of discourse against the shitty parts of reality that I want to either avoid or at least think about in a safe bubble.

I'd much sooner dwell in a place like this than any other kind of bullshit stuffy room that I confine myself to . 

However, what if--just like those poor people in the theater--my life was cut short while I was being a lazy piece of shit and playing video games or watching a bad movie on Netflix, a service that I make my dad pay for?

What kind of legacy would I leave?

What would happen to the people around me?

And finally and what I get most caught up in: where would people be able to find the traces that I left on the world?  Something to show that I was any more than an insignificant blip on a tiny submarine's sonar in an impossibly huge, dark abyss--the fucked-up giant squid and hammerhead sharks that are politicians and celebrities pushing each other out of the waters to stay in the field of view.

And I've come to the conclusion, as I'm sure many have before me.  I really won't leave much behind--unless I die in a really cool way like a sentient death-ray wielding mountain exploding out of my chest, eventually going on to conquer the world and rule it with a stone fist born of my corpse.

Surprise, though!  This isn't a depressed, ranty article (all evidence to the contrary).  Something incredibly special about all of the things that I waste my time with is that it does, in fact, leave behind a (relatively) lot of evidence of my passing through this world.

Not physical, no, most certainly not, but faint lines of electric impulses, traced out against the backdrop of the internet, gaming consoles, controllers and the hardware of my computer.

Of course, I would love for my writing to be read repeatedly and for people to appreciate the spirit that I've left creatively there. However, I'm talking specifically about something people often don't associate REAL death: videogames.

As gamers, we all leave behind a special legacy.  Those worlds we built in Minecraft?  They don't disappear.  They don't end.  Those hats you got in TF2?  Your characters don't throw them away.  Those mindless hours you spent maxing out a character's levels/skillsets in WoW, in Guild Wars?  They don't get deleted.

All of these examples, of course, come with limits, but if people care about them, they can be saved and preserved quite easily, like some digital sarcophagi containing remnants of a person's past.

"But Conor," you cry plaintively, "Isn't that kind of terrifying and creepy? A steam library alone could contain possibly painful memories of games unplayed, or of time wasted!"

And to that I say, "IT DEPENDS ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT." (I only speak in all caps.)

Specifically talking about myself, I would love for people to honor my passing by examining the games I love.  By all means, I would love for my possessions to be spread throughout the people I care about.  Play my Pokemon games, look at all of the stupid nicknames I gave them, appreciate how hilarious a Swampert named "Urkle" is, and then erase the damn save files and play again.  Look at all of those shiny heart containers I had in each save file of Ocarina of Time, AND THEN ERASE THEM ALL and start a new game, if you so choose. I don't give a shit. I won't be here!

Nothing would honor my life more than for people to take a look at the worlds I spent a great deal of my time in in life, and then play them again (or for the first time!), sharing all of the fun experiences that I had even when I cannot be around any longer.

More importantly, the MEMORIES that you've made as a gamer with the people who you played those games with do not fade without the people who shared them with you fading as well.

Now, once again, I'm not saying to hoard all of my possessions and obsessively keep all of my save files.  That's unhealthy and creepy.

Nor am I saying that I deserve recognition for all of the hours in my life that I've wasted grinding levels off of the collective backs of dead Pidgeys and Magikarp training EVs in Pokemon

I merely ask to be appreciated, as anybody would wish, by being memorialized for the things that I've done and the enrichment that my life has had from the games that I've played and the people who I've played them with.

This is my answer to the question that people occasionally ask of gamers: "What happens to your characters, creations, achievements, etc., when you die in real life?"

Whatever the people you leave behind want to do with them.

I would like for people to appreciate such a personal part of my life first, and then move on.  Nothing would make me happier than people sharing my Steam account with each other, and playing the games that they may have never even gotten a chance to play--hopefully with each other!

Of course, there are a billion other ways of memorializing a person's life, and the biggest thing about each one is to adequately honor a person's passing while providing a sense of catharsis about their loss.

Going back to the lives which were so callously ended in Aurora, however, shows that we all have an indeterminate amount of time left on the world.  If you're reading this, then you should be alive (like me! yayyy!), and I congratulate you on that--barring the circumstance that you are a freakish hellspawn or child of the night or some corny bullshit like that.

Being alive thusly, you should remember to appreciate the hell out of life as much as you can.  When thinking about existence in this way, "escaping reality" really isn't an adequate description of your activities, anymore.

It's just living life, because what's the ultimate reality?  You live, and then you die.  Every single moment of time--from a doctor saving a life in a trauma ward to a dorky kid from a small town in Ohio saving a fake person's life in a Trauma Center game--is as real as the next.

Every slow day spent watching "Parks and Rec" on Netflix and eating pizza; every night spent unslept as you slash through a poorly-designed, cookie-cutter dungeon in a mediocre RPG; every day spent sifting through mountains of dumb bullshit on the internet, only to find that gem of a video of a corgi running on a treadmill; it's all real life.

Even if you may regret wasting your time in these ways sometimes, I think that some people, myself included, will be able to safely look back on these moments of blissful idle time when they're older, and be content.  We should all be so lucky to live a full life filled with tons of stupidly spent downtime--others, as in the case of the Aurora murders, were not given a chance to reach this point.

Now, when I say this, I don't mean it to sound creepy or unhealthy--and it "realistically" isn't when you think about the strange Huxley-esque future that we live in: it's not "escaping reality" because what you're doing in that very moment automatically becomes your current reality.

You choose how to live your life, and when your time comes--as it must--then I hope upon hope that you are able to save a little bit of time to look back on what you've done with your life

and say that you loved every moment of it.  

(even as the angry digital spirits of dead orcs, stereotypically envisioned  Nazi soldiers and wild Pokemon dance on your grave with glee)