A Story About a Tree

A Story About a Tree ¹ is an eloquent rebuttal by Raph Koster of the suggestion that a virtual world is “just a game.” It concerns a player called Karyn.

In real life, Karyn was from Norway, but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site about LegendMUD, on which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway).

She became more and more integrated into the virtual community, until eventually she started a guild, “the Norse Traders.” With much effort, she built up this into one of the most popular and well-known guilds in the whole game. The ties between its members were strong, and so were the friendships that developed.

One day, some of her friends realized they hadn’t seen her around for a while. They checked her web site, and found to their dismay a message from her parents. Karyn had died two months earlier in a head-on collision while test-driving a new car. There was a copy on the site of a news item (in Norwegian) describing the accident.

There was an immediate outpouring of grief in LegendMUD. Emails were dispatched, players who hadn’t been around for months logged in to share their sorrow. A memorial service was held, and a garden or remembrance created. In that garden was planted a tree, bearing a plaque: “In memory of Karyn.”

Two things disconcerted the players.

Firstly, how could they feel a genuine sense of loss at the death of someone they had never actually met? Many of them found it hard to articulate their reasons, but eventually it was recognized that Karyn hadn’t been just someone they “gamed with,” she’d been a vibrant part of their community.

Secondly, the grief came at the wrong time. “The Norse Traders” had fallen apart two months earlier, and no one had thought why. It was obvious now, of course—its heart had been torn away. The community had felt Karyn’s loss when she stopped logging in, but only now understood it.

Karyn’s tree stands in LegendMUD to this day. It stands there as a memorial to a much-loved human being, but that it was erected at all is a testament to the realization among the players—as individuals—that they weren’t merely “playing a game.” The grief they felt was real; virtual relationships are real; virtual communities are real.

Virtual worlds are not “just games.”

A Story About a Tree is not unique. In MUD2 there is a Dally Lane, named after the man responsible for bringing it out of academia and into the real world, Simon Dally. Simon was popular not only as an administrator and a player, but also as a human being. When he suffered from a bout of manic depression and committed suicide, the grief felt among the players of both MUD1 and MUD2 was as intense as that for Karyn in LegendMUD.

So why did I present A Story About a Tree here when I could have written A Story About a Road and not have my abridged prose suffer in comparison to Raph’s powerful original?

Let’s look at that opening paragraph again and compare it against the classic indicators for masquerading that I listed earlier:

In real life, Karyn (BONG!) was from Norway (BONG!), but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (BONG!) (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site (BONG!) about LegendMUD, upon which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway (BONG!)).

That’s a lot of BONG!s. Add the guild and the violent death, and Karyn starts to look more than a little suspect.

Before any angry players of LegendMUD email me ² to say that they met Karyn in real life and know for sure she was a real person, I should mention that it’s only the abstract principle I’m concerned with here. The events of A Story About a Tree happened in 1998, so people have had plenty of time to check the facts ³. The point is that even though Karyn almost certainly was whom she said she was, it’s easy to see how, in some other virtual world, someone with her story might not have been real. There could be some unKaryn in some un LegendMUD who was truly a fictional construct.

I wouldn’t doubt that the grief felt by these un LegendMUD players was real. I wouldn’t doubt that many of the people who experienced that grief would be deeply offended by the mere suggestion that unKaryn might have been bogus. It doesn’t undermine the basic point, though.

I’ve seen players fall in love with other players who turned out to be inventions. I’ve seen a player get close to another player who was the creation of two people playing together because they could only afford one account (fortunately they aborted when they realized what was happening). There are complex factors at work here.

A Story About a Tree shows that players can have real relationships with people whom they have never met. The masquerade corollary shows that it’s also possible for players to have real relationships with people who are imaginary.

In virtual worlds ⁴, people are constructs in the minds of other people; relationships between people exist only in the minds of individuals.

In the end, creating constructs in the minds of players is what a designer’s job is all about.