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 Surviving unpublished writings by the person represented in this chapter define his literary orientation toward fantasy and death, and the mythos of Runes of Magic considers its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.
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Notes
Meyer Fortes, “Pietas in Ancestor Worship.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1961, 91(2): 166–191.
William Sims Bainbridge, “Ancestor Veneration Avatars,” in Handbook of Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society, edited by Rocci Luppicini (Hershey, Pennsylvania: Information Science Reference, 2013), pp. 308–321; “Perspectives on Virtual Veneration,” The Information Society, 2013, 29: 196–212.
Percy MacKaye, The Scarecrow or the Glass of Truth: A Tragedy of the Ludicrous (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), pp. 253–278.
Herbert O. Lang, A History of Tuolumne County, California (San Francisco: B. F. Alley, 1882), pp. 216–217
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
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© 2014 William Sims Bainbridge
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Bainbridge, W.S. (2014). Exploring Possibilities (Runes of Magic). In: An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion: The Veneration of Deceased Family in Online Games. Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490599_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490599_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50438-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49059-9
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