Over at Giant Bomb Janine Hawkins has published an excellent post : Guest Column: My Mother’s Games. The byline of the article sums things up very nicely :
Instead of flipping through photo albums to reminisce, guest contributor Janine Hawkins loads up her late mother’s saved games.
The name Janine Hawkins will be familiar to some of you, Janine’s pseudonym, Iris Ophelia, may be more familiar as that’s the name she used when she wrote for New World Notes.
The article itself takes a moving and extremely interesting look at the games Janine’s Mom played and the memories those saved games bring back to Janine. The games listed include Journey, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age : Inquisition, The Sims and Second Life, which as we all know, isn’t a game but fits nicely into the article.
When it came to Second Life, Janine did not login to her Mother’s account to see where she had last been, she instead took a look at her Mother’s art folder and shares a screenshot from there on the Giant Bomb article. Janine explains :
So I didn’t log in to her account and take a screenshot of her avatar as she left it for this article. Instead went into her art folder, and picked a piece of hers to share. Her experience with Second Life isn’t about her game state or where she left off, it’s about what she made.
Janine’s Mother found Second Life to be an excellent avenue for her artistic expression, an expression that had been stifled somewhat earlier in her life.
Janine writes that her Mother gravitated to artists in Second Life, there are plenty of them so it’s not difficult to see why that happened. The larger picture here though was that through her artistic expression in Second Life, Janine’s Mother gained the confidence to dabble in other forms of art :
After having her confidence in her artistic abilities torn down, Second Life steadily built it back up until she was sketching in real life again, exploring a part of herself she thought had atrophied. I will never have patience for people who dismiss Second Life as nothing more than an MMO for horny loners, because it was both the palette and the canvas that helped my mother understand that making art for yourself is much more important than making it for other people.
The article raises some questions in my mind, such as in the future, if Virtual Reality really takes off, will we save our memories to VR for future generations to explore in possibly interactive ways, will we start to leave memories or hidden messages in the metaverse? Will we create games from our memories to be enjoyed long after we’re gone?
The article is lengthy but well worth a read. Second Life is only part of the story but Janine’s approach in exploring memories of her Mother in this way makes for a fascinating narrative. The article also manages to pull off the Draxtor Despres trick of getting behind the avatar, because here we have screenshots from games and virtual worlds and yet the story is really all about the person behind the avatar and in this case, the daughter of that person too, it really is well worth a read.