There are times when you want to make a blog post, but you don’t exactly know how to get started at the actual writing of it. This is one of these mornings because I am not exactly sure what I want to say… but I do know the general message. It is always hard when we come to gather to mourn the loss of someone from the gaming community, and over the last few weeks, we have lost a couple of big voices in Epic Insanity and yesterday Rades. In both cases I know the impact they left on this community largely by the way that their passing has impacted the mutual friends that we shared. In truth I knew neither of them, and there is a bit regret there because they both seem like extremely great people to be around.
That isn’t to say that I didn’t know “of” them both. I recognized the “Epic Insanity” logo from a few discussions I have been involved with and I absolutely remember Rades from Wildstar and the “Rainbeer Road Raceway” that he created. I was talking with my friend Grace about her memories and how she donated so many of these signs to the cause. He seemed like a chaotic force of joy in the world and based on the lives he touched, folks will be talking about his antics for a whole generation of players.
The blood elf with the fire festival sunglasses is probably the image that I will always have in my head when I think of Rades. The challenge however is that for whatever reason, in spite of how many people in common that we both seemingly cared about deeply… our paths never really crossed. I’ve thought a bit trying to figure out how that happened, given that we both got our starts in the WoW Blogging community and I have to figure both interacted with the Blog Azeroth crowd. The only thing I keep landing on is that he was a Horde player and that for most of my WoW Career until Warlords… I was a dedicated Alliance player. I never really read Orcish Army Knife, I think in part because I mentally thought of it as a “Horde” blog. Based on a few of Grace’s favorite articles that they linked me yesterday, I really wish I had because they were absolutely hilarious and poignant.
What this has made me think about is just how fleeting our connections are when we are potentially hundreds or thousands of miles apart and can’t physically lay hands on one another. While I didn’t know Rades or Epic Insanity, I have my own list of people that touched my life that we lost way too soon and that I end up thinking about at least once a week. My friend lists on various games and Twitter follows are littered with emotional landmines of folks who are no longer with us, but that I cannot bring myself to unfollow. Slurms, TenTen, Zann, Stropp, and Psychochild all come to mind as people that I miss talking to greatly. I finally did unfollow River, because his account got hacked and it was trying to distribute Malware, but I wish I still had it there preserved.
The thing is… I can’t say that I was super close to any of them… but at the same time they made up key building blocks of this community that I have come to call family. I am super bad at expressing how much I care about the folks that I spend my free time with. Like in the list of names that I just rattled off, I don’t think I ever said to them specifically how much they meant to me and how much I enjoyed whatever time we had interacted with each other. The connections we have online are so ephemeral and often not rooted in the day-to-day reality of our lives. I go into minor panic attacks every now and then when I have the sudden realization that I have gone several days without seeing anything from a specific person, and then spend the next hour trying to figure out what might have happened. Thanks if you have ever helped me on one of these panicked jaunts because I have this overarching fear that someone will slip from memory without me realizing it.
The thing is now that I have sat down to talk about this today, I am absolutely certain there are other people that we have lost that I am not thinking of right now. I’ve kicked around the idea of hosting a sort of gamer memorial page but wasn’t sure if that was creepy or morbid. The thing is… we know parts of each other, but rarely do we know the totality. You know what I choose to share with you, which is a fraction of the total picture of what makes up my life. So for example I got a window into the lives of Slurms or TenTen, that was curated for me to see but I can’t really say that I knew the totality of the person they were. I worry sometimes about what people will remember me for when I am gone. Above all else I want you to take away from this post that I care.
I might be bad at putting it into words sometimes, but if we have ever interacted for any length of time you have made an impact on me. I maybe care more about “digital ” friends that a lot of people do, because I cut my teeth on IRC. I met my wife on IRC and was introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, so people have always been far more than the pixels dancing across my screen. Be it introversion or distance… there are very few of you that I will ever actually get to know “for real”, but I think it is important that you understand that it doesn’t mean you have not already impacted me greatly. The times we find ourselves living through right now, seems to conspire to rob us of the people we care about in the blink of an eye. I just want to make sure you understand that if you are reading these words and interacting with me… that you matter to me.
I just barely found about Tenten earlier this summer, and Psychochild from this very post. One regret I have about stepping away from Twitter and the blog is that people I have interacted with in game or through blogging have slipped away while I was blissfully unaware.
I lost a lot of my real life friends when I got sick and couldn’t go out much anymore. And even now most of my friends are all online, and some turned into real life friends. I met my husband online, and the man I asked to be my man of honor. The relationships we create online are definitely real. But I also understand the need to step away from the internet or to focus on your real life. They’re still two separate things. And maybe that’s what we’ve to accept too. We’ll never know all of a person’s life. But we can appreciate the part that we do. The friends we lost will never be truly gone as long as we remember them. And, heck, the internet might make them immortal anyhow.
It’s the human condition that we lose the ones we love. At my age, most of my parents’ generation is gone, and soon it will be our time to leave. All we can ever do is love those we have, remember those we don’t, and live for today.