An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion

The Veneration of Deceased Family in Online Games

W. Bainbridge

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349504381, 9781137490544
• eBook ISBN: 9781137490599
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book demonstrates principles of Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs), by running avatars based on eleven deceased members of one family through ten highly diverse virtual worlds from the violent Defiance to the intellectual Uru: Myst Online, from the early EverQuest to the recent Elder Scrolls Online.

1

Exploring Possibilities (Runes of Magic)

Abstract: The challenges and opportunities associated with role-playing deceased persons inside virtual worlds are so many and diverse that this initial chapter aims to introduce their typical features rather than extreme variations as in some later chapters. It is a reconnaissance of a technically fine but somewhat bland virtual world, Runes of Magic, using an avatar based on a deceased person about whom we have at present only limited information. As the word avatar was adapted from Hindu religion by computer programmers years ago to describe the virtual reflection of the user, we suggest adapting the Hindu-Buddhist term sattva to name the purified essence of a person, which defines the character of an avatar. Surviving unpublished writings by the person represented in this chapter define his literary orientation toward fantasy and death, and the mythos of Runes of Magic considers its virtual world to be an evolved form of a book. The chapter shows the series of steps a user must go through to create an avatar and develop it through the early levels of experience inside the typical gameworld, including a variety of activities subsidiary to the main theme of adventures gained exploring an exotic world.

Bainbridge, William Sims. An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion : The Veneration of Deceased Family in Online Games. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137490599.0003.

Sattva: The purified essence of a person, which defines the character of an avatar.

The challenges and opportunities associated with role-playing deceased persons inside virtual worlds are so many and diverse that an initial reconnaissance should avoid unnecessary subtleties. Therefore our first memorial avatar will be based on an interesting but rather remote individual, Ernest E. Wheeler (1876–1955), inside a technically fine but somewhat bland virtual world, Runes of Magic. Ernest was not only a Harvard-educated New York attorney, but also a cantankerous joker, who used to debate the minister in church during sermons, and who transformed the real historical murder of his father’s best friend into a story of mythic proportions. The special wiki devoted to Runes describes its virtual world: “Taborea was once a book in which the creation of a simple world of flora and fauna was supposed to be recorded, but today it is full of myths and legends. The continents are covered by baffling and cryptic traces of time long gone. In the Age of discovery the people of Taborea are now on a quest to find out about their mystical past.”¹

Ancestor veneration

Across the millennia, humans have practiced a wide range of rituals to manage the existential problem of death. That diversity reflects the fact that we have as yet found no perfect solution, but it also results from the fact that death is a swarm of problems. When a member of one’s family dies, one may feel guilty that one did not do enough to save that life. One may still have unpaid debts to that person, even just in the form of thanks for the help they offered during the survivors’ childhoods. The people close to us serve as mentors, and we may wish the lessons to continue after the demise of the teacher. Survivors need to manage their relations with each other, in the shared dislocation caused by the loss of a member of the group. The death of someone near to us implies that death is approaching us as well. One of the classical theories of the origin of religion is that it consolidated from the consolations people shared at the deaths of loved ones, initially in the form of rituals of ancestor veneration.²

The term “AVA” describes an avatar based on a deceased person. Originally, this is the acronym from Ancestor Veneration Avatar.³ Ernest had no children, so technically he was not the ancestor of anyone. However, he was part of the ancestral family of myself, my cousins, and of our children. AVA can also mean Avatar for Virtual Awakening, in which we ourselves awaken to new possibilities of consciousness, even as we reawaken a lost soul. Avatar, of course, is a religious term from Hinduism that refers to the terrestrial manifestation of some aspect of a deity, but has been adopted for characters in virtual worlds that significantly embody the personal identity of the user.

An AVA does represent the user to some extent, but also represents another person, whom I call the sattva. This term comes from the same cultural tradition as avatar, and I am not really misusing sattva but reinterpreting it, as was done with avatar decades ago. The Buddhist term bodhisattva refers to purified saints who are unusually enlightened and from whom we can learn transcendent truths. In using sattva for the being represented by an AVA, I stress that it is a purified form of the real deceased person, using the memories and other information we have about that person to construct a virtual spiritual guide that will lead us through a series of enlightening adventures. In the case of Ernest E. Wheeler, however, I did not know him very well, so part of the challenge is discovering him.

The importance of being Ernest

When preparing to create an avatar based on a deceased person one did not know very well, one should catalog all the memories one has about the person, and then augment them with whatever other information might be available. In the case of Ernest, I seem to have exactly one clear memory. I was a small boy, visiting my grandparents’ house at Maple Hill Farm, a short walk up the road from our own dwelling, in Bethel, Connecticut. Ernest was the brother of my grandmother, and I recall that he was a lean gentleman with a New England accent. He is sitting on the front porch and asks me to sit on his knee. He bounces me up and down, then pretends to drop me on the floor, but catches me at the last moment.

I also recall a few things that members of the family told me about Ernest, and one of those second-hand memories is so vivid it may be a mixture of what I was told and what I saw. We lived in a small house that had rather low ceilings. When Ernest visited, he would often act out the same humorous ritual. He would step from our living room into the library, slap his hand on the top of the door frame and shout, “Oh my head!” Perhaps the first time, our family thought he had really cracked his skull, but soon they realized he had cracked a joke. Ernest was a life-long bachelor, and within the family it was said that this resulted from disappointment in a failed romance he experienced early in life, about which I have been able to learn nothing.

When preparing virtual revival for a deceased person, one step is to write down any memories one recalls, and add others as they come to mind. A second step is to assemble any documents one possesses. A third step is to request information from other members of the family. In the case of Ernest, my son Lars Bainbridge possessed a file of papers that he first described by long-distance telephone, then scanned some into his computer and sent them via email. Lars also reported the result of online searches he had done years before, finding that Ernest had been centrally involved in a 1934–1935 case that reached the US Supreme Court, Shanferoke Coal and Supply Corporation versus Westchester Service Corporation, which involved a dispute about an agreement to purchase large amounts of coal over a period of years.

The documents included a death notice, which was sent to newspapers, and printed in condensed form by at least one.⁴ With respect to his character, it described him as “a polemicist, writing extensively on many controversial matters of the day.” Some of those matters were crucially important, and he took positions that would be respected today, such as when he left the Republican Party because it rejected American membership in the League of Nations, and was among the leadership of the American League of Nations Association. Some of the matters may seem trivial, but one of those connects him to the fantasy and horror ethos of many MMOs.

On an advertisement for a performance of the play, The Scarecrow by Percy MacKaye, he had scrawled “They never hear of Hawthorne’s Feathertop!” Indeed, as MacKaye acknowledged in a preface to the published script, it was inspired by, if not exactly adapted from, “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.⁵ This was a short story about a New England witch who brings a well-dressed scarecrow to life, and sends it into the world of fashion and commerce, since most real men there also totally lack substance.⁶ Ernest corresponded directly with MacKaye, and with drama critic Walter Prichard Eaton, who both had been at Harvard when Ernest was there, asserting that Hawthorne’s work was superior to MacKaye’s and deserved more respect. At one point, Ernest commented, “The trouble with the theater is that it is too often theatrical.” But notice that MMO role-playing is a kind of very theatrical theater, in which a member of the audience takes centerstage, just as Ernest attempted to do in this agitated correspondence. Hawthorne called the scarecrow a simulacrum rather than an avatar, yet it functioned as the avatar of the witch.

Ernest’s death notice also recognized that he had served in the First World War, ending with the rank of major, but perhaps not seeing action: “His Army posts included that of Inspector of the National Army Training Detachment at colleges under the War Department committee on Education and Special Training.” It also reported: “He was an enthusiastic canoeist and woodsman, having paddled down many rivers in Canada, along the Eastern seaboard of the United States, in England, and down the Moldau in ancient Bohemia.” Thus, it was unclear whether an authentic AVA of him would enjoy virtual combat, but it would certainly enjoy exploration of informatic wilderness.

In preparation for creating an AVA, one has the choice to delve deeply into the context of the person’s life through online sources, or not, depending upon the goals of the exercise. Two real estate websites let me see a picture of the apartment building where Ernest died, learn it was built in 1929, and read: “This prewar Upper East Side Art Deco building features old world charm and elegance.” Of course one may visit any real-world site important in the life of a sattva, and as of June 13, 2014, I could have rented a one-bedroom apartment in the building for $3,500 per month. My most influential information about Ernest came, however, from a photocopy of memories of family history he dictated a few months before his death, which I had puzzled over for decades.

I was told that this remarkable document was not entirely accurate. For example, Ernest wrote about the adventures his father had when he went west from his native Maine to California during the gold rush. According to family legend, Thomas Heber Wheeler (1838–1908) wanted to marry Ellen Elizabeth Hyde (1843–1933), but they were mere children and her father would not consider the proposition until Thomas had proven his ability to support her in prosperity. One of the adventures, as Ernest described it, could well have been a quest arc in a massively multiplayer online game:

My father had on the left side of his head a wound in the scalp, which we children could feel and then listen to the account of its infliction. It seems that one early evening his elderly partner was on the shore of a stream washing or panning out gold, and in so doing assumed a crouching position. My father was at the camp higher up the bank and was cooking their evening supper consisting of corn beef hash. When it was ready he stepped onto the bank to call his partner and was horrified to see a desperado, an “enemy” of the old man, creeping up behind him with a long knife. Thomas was too late, for the desperado plunged it into the old man’s abdomen, and as my father described, giving force by effective gestures, “twisted it about.” This twisting and turning of the knife was the very acme of our horror, and in my boyish re-narration I found it extremely effective, particularly if I suddenly used one of my audience as a subject to try it on.

My father says of his old partner, “He died in my arms.” Even now that scene of these two, the boy and the man, the boy with his arms around the old man, is, to me, touching in the extreme. I used to wait for Father to say, “He died in my arms.” They were on the outskirts of a mining settlement, which became later a county seat. Father aroused the miners and there was a high sheriff, none other than Jim Stetson, whose sister later married Charles Wheeler. The high sheriff at once swore in a posse and Father presented himself to Jim, who said, “This is a boy. He has no beard,” as he stroked Father’s chin. The miners intervened on Father’s behalf, and he was accepted by Jim. One of the mounted bands by good luck captured the murderer within upwards of twenty-four hours, and he was held by the sheriff in a makeshift jail, which was merely a log cabin.

A rumor spread that a band of desperadoes had organized to rescue the murderer. This story my father believed, and with good reason. He succeeded in organizing a lynching party. Father later came to see that the miners probably thought Stetson would only make a show of resistance, and would indeed be glad to get rid of his “guest” in so simple and effective a manner. It turned out they were wrong. Though Stetson warned the party that he would protect his prisoner by force of arms, they manned a long log, four on a side, with the boy at the front where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Exploring Possibilities (Runes of Magic)
• 2  Selecting a World (Uru: Myst Online)
• 3  Achieving a Goal (Defiance)
• 4  Seeking Truth (Tabula Rasa)
• 5  Combatting Heresy (Perfect World)
• 6  Singing a Song (EverQuest)
• 7  Uniting a Couple (Guild Wars 2)
• 8  Enduring Horror (Age of Conan)
• 9  Insuring Hope (Elder Scrolls Online)
• 10  Resting in Peace (Lord of the Rings Online)