What happens to your online presence when you die in real life?

by Nicholas Deleon


So here’s a weird question for y’all: what happens when you die? More specifically, what happens to the “online version” of you? Will your World of Warcraft guild hold a funeral for you, one that’s promptly invaded by a bunch of rival faction jerks? Will there be a Facebook “We miss you, man” group? Does anyone in your life have the password to you Gmail account, should you need to contact your contacts? “Remember Bill? Yeah, he doesn’t live here anymore.”

It’s apparently a big problem in online worlds such as World of Warcraft. Blizzard doesn’t exactly release account information willy nilly, so getting into contact with your former guild members, people who depend[ed] on your heals and buffs and the like, can be a huge pain in the behind. (Pardon my French.) And because people tend to drop dead, for lack of a better term, they often don’t have a Plan B, let alone Plan A, vis-à-vis their online presence.

You can do like one Oklahoma man did last year. He had a USB flash drive filled with all sorts of important contact information. “Break glass in case of emergency” type of thing. So, upon his death, his son fired up the flash drive, and was able to contact all the important folks in his life, virtual or otherwise.

Then there’s those e-mail services that promise to send e-mails after your death—“hey, man, I did cheat in that foot race in high school.”

Now all those hours spent pleasuring yourself can be traded in for valuable gaming experience: The DIY Joydick

by John Biggs

This is pretty much the craziest thing I’ve seen all day (except for Stephen King - homeboy looks weird). This is a ring that you place over your penis that allows you to move your wang in four directions to control the on-screen Atari 2600 action. Strokes shoot your missiles on screen and gameplay continues until issue.

The makers at the SF Media Labs note that there is really a philosophy behind this process of build-up and release.

Our impetus to win can be seen as a drive towards transcendence. A transcendence that is both over death and, in a sense, a metaphorical death. Winning a video game is much like what Martin Heidegger referred to as becoming a “being towards death.” That is a self-realized individual who has overcome uncertainty in life, reconciled their place in the universe and has acknowledged death within their life.

This simultaneity of both transcendence in life and the acknowledgment of death is also encountered during what the French like to call “la petite morte” or in English, “the little death.” This is the refractory period following sexual climax in which a person can achieve no further orgasm and is filled both with pleasure and melancholy.

It would be reasonable to assert that the tension that builds during gameplay and the release achieved through victory are similar to the events leading up and through a sexual orgasm.

Got that? Good. Now all they have to do is connect this to World of Warcraft - say linking the orgasm to a level up - and a generation of men will never have sex, even unto death. Full instructions are available at the SF Media Labs website.

Just think: what if you could connect this to Twitter?