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.