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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Five years ago, the news that a beauty pageant participant had died in a car crash stunned her virtual world friends. But was it really an accident?
Apr 14, 2003 | In the spring of 2002, after more than a year in preproduction, I began work on "Real People Virtual Worlds," a documentary film exploring how people interact with each other in the graphically and textually mediated settings of online worlds. Along the way, I expected to interview people who make like they're elves or slay monsters or just hang out in virtual taverns with their virtual friends. And I did. What I didn't expect is that I'd stumble into a real-life murder mystery, complete with intrigue, deception, and, ultimately, the disappearance and death of a beauty queen.
Karyn logged onto LegendMUD for the first time in the fall of 1996. A law student at the University of Oslo, she found the novelty of LegendMUD -- a text-based virtual world that promised "adventures in a place both strange and familiar" -- a welcome respite from her studies. As a newcomer to the world of multiuser dungeons, Karyn was eager to learn more about the art of being someone else. "I started out being me," she confessed at a role-playing discussion in the out-of-character auditorium (where players can take off their masks, so to speak, and just be themselves). In her charmingly broken English, she added, "I have never done anything like playing games like this." The MUD's denizens welcomed the Norwegian newcomer into their community and offered her advice on how to become a role player.
Being the sort of person who makes friends easily, Karyn decided to pursue the life of a merchant within the game. She learned how to acquire items in remote or dangerous parts of the fantasy world of LegendMUD, transport them back to town, and sell them (at a nice markup) to other players who lacked the knowledge or the time (or the patience) to set off and find the items for themselves. Before long, she had formed a mercantile group called the Norse Traders -- like horse traders, but with Vikings. The Norse Traders, under her leadership, emerged as a powerful, well-respected guild. All because of Karyn.
Years later, on the other side of the world, I sit in front of my computer reading about Karyn's adventures in this virtual world. I reflect on the fact that the entire community, indeed the whole universe that was and remains LegendMUD, ran on a 486 desktop computer that sat under a desk in Austin, Texas. I page through the archives of LegendMUD, reading about her life.
"Thanks to Beam, Point, Landy, Aermid, Rummy, Outsider, Manic, and the many others who have helped me so far," she wrote on her Web site. These were her friends in the game -- people she knew (and who knew her) only through a blinking cursor on the screen. And yet the group had formed lasting friendships. I look at the photograph on her LegendMUD Web page. A beautiful young woman, wearing a "Miss Norway finalist" sash, smiles back at me. The caption reads, "This photo is taken at the Miss Norway 1995 contest. The guys on the picture are some of the contestants in the Mr. Norway contest, and the girl in the back is Monica, a friend of mine, also participating in the pageant. You should now be able to determine who's who on the picture, including who's me ..."
It's painful to read the details of her life, knowing that it was about to come to an abrupt and tragic end. On Jan. 29, 1998, Karyn and a friend were out test-driving a Porsche 911. Sometime around 6 p.m., they crossed over the center lane of a stretch of highway outside of Trondheim and collided head-on with a Volkswagen. Karyn and her friend were killed instantly, as was the driver of the other vehicle. Or was she? Karyn's death would soon become a cause célèbre in virtual world circles. The more I looked into the story, however, the more I began to suspect foul play.
When your friend logs out of a virtual world, his or her avatar remains in the world for a moment or two and then blinks out of existence. You expect to see the friend again tomorrow evening. Or maybe the day after that. But sometimes your friend doesn't return. Weeks pass. Then months. Most often it's because the person has grown tired of the game and has moved on. But on rare occasions, it's because the individual behind the keyboard has blinked out of existence in the real world. And in the real world, that person won't magically reappear with an experience hit or stat loss. Death in reality is permanent.
Without Karyn's leadership, the Norse Traders began to fall apart. Weeks passed. People knew that something was wrong but couldn't figure out what. Then someone realized: Karyn was missing. E-mails were sent out, but she didn't reply. Where was she? Was she in trouble? Some friends decided to investigate. What they found shocked the community to its core. Posted on Karyn's home page was a newspaper article reporting her death and a letter from her parents. Karyn was no more. Real life had become real death. She was gone.
In a virtual world, as in real life, people mourn the passing of a friend. Given the nature of Internet communities, it's not surprising that there is often a lag of weeks or even months before news of a person's real-world demise arrives in the virtual realm. When the news of Karyn's death finally reached LegendMUD, the outpouring of grief was immediate and heartfelt. The message boards in every tavern quickly overflowed with expressions of sorrow.
"I will always remember the good times we had," one of them read, "the good laughs we shared, and the chats. I didn't knew [sic] much about you, but one thing is for sure, you were a good friend to me. You had a good heart."
News of Karyn's death soon spread to other virtual lands. Even players who had never met Karyn, or even played on LegendMUD, sent messages to express their sorrow. As a player of Discworld (an unrelated virtual world) wrote: "We play 'games' like this one here on the Internet, often without realizing how our actions affect *real* people, perhaps thousands of miles away, on the other side of a telnet session. We form friendships that outgrow the boundaries of any simple 'game'; sometimes, we even fall in love. How can this be, that we experience such profound emotion from a game, with people that we have never met face to face? It is my hope that those that read of your story will reflect upon the relationships that *they* have built, playing these 'games', and try to realize the importance of building lasting, caring friendships wherever possible, because life is fleeting ..."
In response to player requests, the immortals (the administrators of the MUD) decided to construct a "Garden of Remembrance" to honor Karyn's memory. After many hours of wandering around LegendMUD, I finally stumbled across it. When I (metaphorically) entered the room (actually, a database record), the following text was displayed:
The Garden of Remembrance
"This ever-lit room exists in memory of the people that had brought light to the land of Legend and left us prematurely. The grass grows soft and green, the sky above seems always to be a perfect, endless blue. The memories of friendship and laughter and joy abound. A rose garden lies to the east and a quiet pond to the west. An imposing arch of trees leads out to the north.
"A small tree is here, lovingly planted in memory of Karyn. A brass plaque has been placed in front of the tree.
"The plaque reads: 'In Memory of Karyn whose kindness and companionship will always be missed.'"
Raph Koster, at the time one of LegendMUD's administrators and now the lead designer of Sony's Star Wars Galaxies, wrote a eulogy for Karyn that has been widely reprinted over the past five years. He called it "A Story About a Tree," and originally told it at a luncheon for Ultima Online players (he was also the lead designer of UO) in May 1998. In his essay, Raph describes the friendships that Karyn made in the game and the difficulty players had in articulating the grief they felt over the loss of someone they had never met in real life. The Garden of Remembrance, in Raph's view, marked a defining moment in the consciousness of the online gaming community:
"In the end, that garden and that tree served not only as a memorial to a well-loved and much-missed person, but as a marker of a moment, a moment in which the players of an online game realized that they weren't 'playing a game.' That the social bonds that they felt within this 'game' were Real ... Sometimes it takes a moment of grief to make people realize it, and sometimes people just come to an awareness over time, but the fundamental fact remains: when we make a friend, hurt someone's feelings, suffer a loss, or accomplish something in an online world, it's real. It's not 'just a game.' I am not going to let anyone tell me that the Garden of Remembrance isn't Real, or that the grief we all felt over Karyn's death was not Real. And I hope that UO players aren't going to let anyone tell them that their experiences within UO aren't Real either, that it's 'just a game.' It may be for some people, but we all know better, don't we? For Karyn's sake, and also for our own."
This "Garden in the Machine" helped the community come to terms with the loss of their friend in the virtual and real world. Five years later, however, the wounds would be reopened in a way few could have imagined.
