ONLINE FRIENDS & SAYING GOODBYE: COPING WITH LOSS IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY

If you’re like the average Millenial/Gen X-er, a good portion of your time is spent online in some capacity. If you’re a gamer, that tends to go doubly so. A lot of gamers play co-op games with their online friends, join guilds through games like World of Warcraft, or frequent online gaming forums. Through these activities, we make friends with people we will likely never meet in “real life”. The capacity to make friends within Cyber Space is a testament to how something once shamed as an anti-social, indoor-kid hobby is actually a unique exercise in socialization for a community of people with one shared interest; it’s one of the many reasons why gaming is so valuable.

As a gamer, you’ve likely made online friends via gaming through some avenue whether it be guild-mates, a forum friend, or you played a fire match with a stranger and added each other to subsequently then jump into games every night after work, etc. However you met them, this community offers a wealth of friendship that is only growing that sense of camaraderie through current gaming phenomena such as Twitch and esports.

As life does, it gives and it takes…and it quite often takes. Death can draft in like a breeze and take people from us so swiftly, leaving in its wake many esoteric feelings of morose confusion. When this kind of loss happens to a friend or family member outside the realm of Cyber Space, we grieve and our social circles understand. We are offered sincere, relatable condolences in droves. But what about when that person, for all intents and purposes, only existed to you? Online friends who you never knew in person but connected with just like anyone else within your immediate vicinity? It’s hard to explain the importance of a bond that wasn’t physically tangible to outsiders of your virtual world. How do you grieve? Who do you talk to? Are you justified in feeling such a loss so deeply?

The answer is simple: yes, of course! Losing someone whom you’ve never met is a tumultuous experience, but at the end of the day...a loss is a loss, and we are indentured to our late online friends to feel it in its entirety in memoriam to the companionship and time given to us by them.

When I was 14 years old, I had a Gateway desktop PC gifted to me by my father. I spent my time in Final Fantasy AOL chatrooms, scrolling through GameFAQS.com, and writing in my Livejournal. Yes, that’s right, Livejournal.

One of my first Livejournal friends was a kid who went by the alias “Ruxpin”. At the time, the friendship may have been considered unusual, as making online friends was still actively discouraged. But he, Ruxpin from Canada, and I, Pryde from Florida, unassumingly maintained a friendship through Livejournal for years, often times playing games of Starcraft together and causing trouble in IIRC groups. We trolled the Something Awful forums together, and when World of Warcraft came out in 2004, we joined the Something Awful guild “Goon Squad” on the Mal’Ganis server; he an Undead Rogue and I a Troll Warrior.

We put years into the game together, spending many late nights talking on Ventrillo. He became friendly with some of my first boyfriends through our time spent playing games, always playing the part of the protective older brother. It was a relationship I treasured dearly.

Eventually, I fell off World of Warcraft and my life became pretty chaotic for a few years. I moved around a lot and was not online and in touch as I used to be. Every few months he would call me to “check in” and make sure I was okay – something I can’t say anyone else has ever done for me. Once my life settled down, we got back into our gaming routine and would often chat on Skype. We made plans several times to meet at events, but life would happen and it never worked out.

I spoke to him one night via Facebook Messenger while I lay in bed. He had a job opportunity in Florida that he wanted to take. I encouraged him, offered help, and said goodnight.

I awoke the next morning to see condolences of his passing scribed generously on his Facebook page.

After 16 years, I wondered now who would call and check up on me.

"The perception that online relationships are somehow less real than their physical counterparts exemplifies what Nathan Jurgenson, a New York-based sociologist and researcher for the messaging platform Snapchat, calls “digital dualism.” Contemporary identities and relationships are no more or less authentic in either space. “We’re coming to terms with there being just one reality and digital is part of it, not any less real or true,” Jurgenson said. “What you do online and what you do face-to-face are completely interwoven.”

Your Internet Friends Are Real

I was absolutely crushed by the death of my dear friend – someone who had been with me through the many ups and downs in my life. But like the uniqueness of our time spent together, the grieving process that I experienced was also one that I was not accustomed to.

As a species, we understand death despite its heart-wrenching effects – the person you’ve come to love and care deeply about is now gone from your life now leaving a void as big as the space they created. The loss of online friends, however, is anomalous in how after the passing, we are haunted by their online digital footprint. This haunting can take many forms, whether it be their social media accounts, gamertags, YouTube videos, Twitch VOD’s, logging into Battle.net and seeing their tag “last logged in….” – these reminders are simultaneously beautiful and brutal.

At face value, nothing has changed on your end; after all, the accounts are still there, and it’s through those accounts that you knew them. But the knowledge that your online friends are no longer behind those accounts lodges itself in the gut, weighing us down despite looking right at their profile photo and seeing no on-screen difference than when they were alive.

It’s difficult to navigate the rocky waters of losing our online friends – someone you care for, yet never met. Hopefully, you can turn to the community to see if other people are grieving with you, but often times this is a lonely undertaking. Turning to people in your daily routine for condolences is usually not a fruitful experience; it can often be unintentionally patronizing or dismissive because this kind of loss does not compute with them. This dismissive solace can be polarizing, but you are never alone. A loss is a loss, and your feelings of grief are valid.

While everyone grieves differently, there are a lot of therapeutic ways to displace these feelings in a positive way:

• Send flowers and/or condolences to the family if that’s an option. Let them know they were cared about in a community beyond their knowledge.

• Stream in their honor. If you have a game together, it’s nice to rinse through your feelings by revisiting those memories. If they had a game they were looking forward to, stream that.

• Adopt their gamer tag for characters in future games to aid their online legacy.

• Participate in a charity in their honor. Depending on how our person has passed, there is likely a charity for it. Suicide Prevention, Cancer, Drug Abuse, Accidents, etc.

• Raise money towards the greater good in their name, whether this is via crowdfunding, an event or streaming. Running an Extra-Life charity in their name is one I personally would recommend.

• Write. You don’t have to be a writer to write. If you don’t write often, I feel this exercise is hugely beneficial, in fact. Write an article, write in a journal, write a letter directly to them. The brain goes into a different mode when writing, working certain areas often not triggered during any other task. Writing helps elicit not only creative thought but emotional response, allowing writing to be a hugely cathartic tool while grieving.

• Grief Forums. If you feel you can’t (or don’t want to) talk about this with anyone in your immediate life, there are many wonderful grief forums out there that you can find an unbelievable amount of warmth from. Sound lame? It’s not, I promise you. Here are some great ones: Compassionate Friends, copious subreddits for grieving, some tailor-made for particular losses and causes of death. Here’s Reddit: Grief Support to get started with a more general one.

• Listen. You can download Podcasts about grief or online friends if you find comfort in listening to someone while you go through your day to day.

• If it’s your thing, get a tattoo! You could say it’s my thing.

Thankfully, we live in a time where we are on the precipice of online friendships becoming the norm. The line between “real life” and our online space becomes increasingly more blurred as the years pass and the attitude towards the internet changes dramatically. We have both feet firmly planted in the digital age; and the stigma of online friendship is slowly washing away and integrating into societal norm. How lucky we are to so easily make these connections and friendships; the ability to create and maintain friendships with people all over the world is becoming one of gaming’s fundamentals. At the end of the day, we should remember how fortunate we truly are to cultivate these friendships through such a monumentally unique community, and we should continue to honor them when they leave us.

If you or someone you know is having a hard time through the grieving process or anything where they need help, please don’t be afraid to reach out. Please visit PsychCentral for a list of pertinent Hotlines – support is out there for you.

I want to dedicate this article to my friend Ruxpin – gone but never forgotten.

#gaming #grief #psychology #loss #warcraft #onlinefriends