Geekitude: Screencaps like old photographs

Like many people nowadays, I have folders of pictures on my computer, documented memories of good times with friends, family get-togethers, vacations and special occasions. However, there is one folder on my computer that is slightly different. Rather than a folder of photographs, it is a folder of screen captures – virtual “photographs” of memorable moments from my days playing an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).

I am a veteran of the MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a game that brought together players from all over the world who wanted to pretend to be a part of the Star Wars Universe. (For those of you who are familiar with the game, I was a pre-NGE player. I joined the massive exodus of players who quit when the new upgrade was enacted).

As much as I feel justified in poking fun at myself and others who are or have been in the grip of MMORPGs, I’d be lying if I claimed that I don’t get somewhat emotional when looking at my old screencaps. After all, the game – and more importantly, the people I met in the game – were a large part of my life for nearly three years.

As I scroll through the screencaps I have saved on my computer, I can’t help but feel like I am flipping through a photo album, glancing at faces of old friends from long ago. I was a member of a roleplaying community, a community that extended the game past the mechanics of experience points and leveling up. We created new personalities for our characters. For example, I was a Twi’lek doctor who was married to a prominent Imperial politician – and I became a political liability for him because I was known to occasionally have dealings with those who were sympathetic to the Rebel cause. Our character creations, and the storylines that accompanied them, made for some very exciting, interesting, engaging and poignant memories. Many of these moments are documented in my screencap album.

I remember the time some friends and I tried to hunt down a Krayt Dragon on Tatooine (my character’s doctoring skills came in handy that day). I remember my character’s wedding party on Naboo. I remember when our guild hosted an “Iron Man” competition on Endor, testing warriors’ survival skills in the depths of the hostile forest – I also remember the triumph of our guild’s female members when the champion turned out to be an Iron WOMAN.

And as I am sharing these memories with you all, I realize how difficult it is to decide whether to write “my character’s doctoring skills” or “MY doctoring skills,” “my character’s wedding” or “MY wedding.” You may laugh and say that it’s a sad, pathetic symptom of a confusing fiction with reality. After all, I am not married nor do I possess even the remotest shred of medical training. I am not a member of the Galactic Empire. There is a very real difference between my living flesh, my personality, my talents and the collection of animated pixels on a computer screen.

But what about the memories? What about the people in those memories?

I have in my computer album a screencap depicting five members of our guild, including myself, standing in front of our local city hall. Who do I understand these people to be? For example, the man standing to my character’s left in the picture is a character I knew for about two and a half years. His name was Pandorren. He was a prominent guild member, a competent swordsman, a politician striving to mayor of a town on Dantooine and a devout Loyalist to the Imperial cause. At least, that’s who his CHARACTER was. He told me a little bit about his “real” self, as a computer programmer in Liverpool, England. But to me, the man standing next to “me” in the screencap is not a computer programmer from Liverpool. I never knew that man.

And yet, I cannot think of the person in the picture, Pandorren, as anything other than a very dear friend. We shared many good times together – and what does it matter that he was only partially “real?” I didn’t know the computer programmer, but I DO feel like I knew Pandorren.

When we play these types of games, we extend portions of ourselves into the world of pixels. We fill in the empty gaps in our alternate personae with new qualities, fabricated bits-and-pieces, fragments of identities we do not (or cannot) possess in the real world. How should we understand these half-real people? And when we are done playing the game and move on with our real lives, should we leave them behind like the imaginary friends we created when we were small?