Nine Souls, One Body

Second Life blog/newspaper New World Notes reports on an interesting resident, wilde Cunningham. wilde is actually nine separate people on one account, all of them with physical handicaps that keep them in a care center. From the article: "We formed the man avatar first, because that day, we had more men in the group. We always wanted a female one, but we haven't taken the time to create her yet. Mary and Johanna would like that very much. We decided on how wilde would look first by starting with skin colors. We have both black and white in our real life group, and didn't want to have those because neither is better than the other. So we picked orange."

Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would post an explanation of stories like these. I can't go to the website because work blocked it, so how the hell am I supposed to translate this small paragraph into something tangible.

Re:Weird

[Golias]

The jist (rather than pasting in the entire text like a total Karma whore):

A group of nine residents in an assisted-living home, some of whom completely unable to operate a computer on their own, all of whom are wheelchair-bound, but none of whom have mental disabilities, created a Second Life character with the help of a person (a resident, IIRC... I just skimmed most of the story), who turned them on to the idea and controls the interface for them.

Pretty much everything the character says and does is decided by a consensus of these nine people, including the look of the character itself (a big bulky guy with orange skin and red hair.)

From the article, it sounds like they were a pretty tight-knit bunch before they even started playing this game, which probably makes it easier for them to cooperatively roleplay a single avitar.

Poorly written...

[b0r0din]

All I can say is the story itself is very poorly written, the slashdot submission equally poorly written, and the story itself not particularly interesting in any way aside from a fairly boring human interest story with absolutely no analysis or conjecture. So disabled people interact using an MMORPG barely anyone plays. Wow.

I invite someone to respond and get modded insightful for explaining why this matters like I'm a 10-yr old. :)

*crickets chirping*

Re:Poorly written...

[Naikrovek]

its interesting, but more for reasons of simulacra than reasons of handicapped people participating in normal life.

anyone can feel normal in a place where normal is clearly defined, in online games. simulate your own existance online, walk, talk, fight, dance, equally as good as anyone else. I'm not handicapped but I imagine that this feeling is intensely pleasurable to someone that can't participate fully in the real world because of physical limitations.

I have a great deal of respect for those of us t

Re:Poorly written...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do understand this, and I sympathize with people who have disabilities, but maybe had the author not tried to pluralize an avatar's name to be gimmicky, it wouldn't give me fits. For instance,

When wilde Cunningham gets their Second Life sea legs, they'd like to build a house.

There are so many different ways they could reword this to not sound stupid. Fine, ok, don't capitalize the first name for your own conventions. Whatever. Yet it continues, for paragraphs. It's anguishing. Not to mention the fact

Re:Poorly written...

[angedinoir]

And I'd really like to hear more of this trip to Target.

Yea, does it have any juicy sex scenes later?

Re:Poorly written...

[Golias]

One thing that's slightly interesting is that it's a "person" who is making every decision, including who to be, by committee.

It's also interesting that what these nine people settled on as their chosen compromise was something rather eccentric and quirky. Most people would expect the moderating force of nine people agreeing on everything to result in something rather mundane, rather than a big orange hulk with red hair.

The presense of wilde in the game presents the other players an opportunity to intera

Collective Mind

[angedinoir]

The presense of wilde in the game presents the other players an opportunity to interact with a character which has a sort of collective mind.

Never mind that it would take like 20 minutes for that collective mind to formulate a response and type it in.

Re:Poorly written...

[PaleBlueCat]

Hmmm, I think I see your problem.... This involves contact between ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS!! As strange as it may sound, not all worthwile interactions are via a keyboard! If you head "outside" you may be able to "talk" to someone - try it: scary, but in the end, worth it.

Re:the ONLY thing interesting this tells us

[Jonny 290]

pretty much standard mmo procedure. they want current members to let new players roll characters on their accounts, after which they'll promptly buy their own license if they dig the game. basically banking on the fact that many IRL friends enjoy playing MMO's together.

Sci-Fi story

[belg4mit]

This sounds like a short story in one of the recent Year's Best SF edited by Daid Hartwell. The premise in the story is that any collection of human beings whom in themselves are deemed legally incompetent, may gain legal recognition as long as the collective posseses all the faculties of a normal individual.

... how cool! ...

[ninjagin]

I just read the article and while I can see how some folks might find what they're doing uninteresting, I got a kick out of it.

My wife and I used to "team up" to solve Tomb Raider puzzles -- it was a pretty cool thing. She's spot something I didn't, or would have a different approach to a certain action sequence. We would each keep our own solo games rolling, but the cooperative game would be our fave, always.

I guess the thing I find most cool about this article is that these are nine physically disable

Re:... how cool! ...

[Rob T Firefly]

Thanks for the post. After wrestling through the badly written article, I agree that it is pretty cool indeed. I'm happy those nine can keep something like that going.. I know I couldn't get eight of my friends to agree on a movie rental or a pizza topping, let alone a main social outlet.

I just hope if I ever find myself in a situation like that, I'll find a better game to live vicariously through.