Funerals in the ‘World of Warcraft’: Religion,polemic,and styles of play in a videogame universe

Abstract

This article discusses ‘World of Warcraft’ (WoW), one of the most popular of today’s ‘massively multiplayer online role playing games’ (MMORPG). The author focuses on the funeral ceremonies organized by players within the game. The first section gives a brief outline of the different perspectives in current research relative to the study of religion on the internet and particularly in digital universes. The second contains the discussion on cyber funerals in WoW and the different dimensions of such ceremonies. In particular, the author examines the controversy surrounding a ceremony honoring a deceased player, which was unexpectedly and violently interrupted by other players. In the third and final part, the author considers the anthropological issues that this case raises.

For almost two decades, digital worlds have played an increasing role in our lifestyles. Communication tools and social networks such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook, and virtual universes such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are social spaces in which the lives of our contemporaries are played out (Turkle, 1985, 1986, 1999; King and Borland, 2003). This salient presence has led certain specialists to see the premise of new sociabilities (Lévy, 1995; Belin, 1998) emerging in these spaces. Pleasure and both physical and social dependences mingle here through these unusual new subjects, whose contours are in perpetual redefinition. Others (Frogneux, 2002; Andrieu, 2011), on the contrary, see them as an extension of our social lives – in short, a normal overflow of the human outside of the body, a technological and virtual prosthesis. In view of the overlapping of these spaces and the fact that religious issues can occupy center stage in these parallel worlds, it would seem a matter of urgency to analyze both their meaning and their function.

My research in recent years has focused on ‘World of Warcraft’ (WoW), the most popular of today’s virtual universes. ¹ How does studying such virtual universes help us to understand contemporary religious transformations? This article aims to answer that question.

The discussion is divided into three sections. The first gives a brief outline of the different perspectives in current research relative to the study of religion on the internet and particularly inside videogames. This allows me to clarify my own approach and method, in the light of which I shall proceed to describe the principal dimensions characterizing the land of WoW before synthesizing the religious dimension of WoW. This first section will thus serve as part of the framework of the investigation.

In the second section, I focus my discussion on a significant instance of this religious dimension: the case of cyberfunerals in WoW. In the third section, I analyze the symbolic controversy surrounding a ceremony honoring a deceased gamer, involving meditation and prayers by avatars (digital representations of individuals), which was unexpectedly and violently interrupted by other avatars. This leads me finally to a consideration of the changes in the anthropological boundaries of religion that this case reflects.

Religion and digital worlds

Approaches

Over the past ten years, the number of socio-anthropological studies analyzing the link between religion and the internet has increased. The web constitutes, perhaps above all, a source of information about current religions. Thanks to the internet, we now have a vast new data bank in this area (Bainbridge, 2007). It is therefore primarily as a heuristic device that the web is now analyzed by scholars of religion. The internet appears as a device capable of supplying research data on current religions. The object of this recourse to the internet is therefore what is conventionally and classically taken as the religious, but in the light of a fresh form of data, or mediated through new means.

In this regard, religion also represents the sum and substance of what our religious contemporaries put on the internet. In this incredibly dense set of information questions arise concerning the use of the internet as a tool by religiously oriented actors to communicate their faith (Campbell, 2010). Accordingly, the presence of religions on the web has given rise to studies of social phenomena such as groups of believers and brotherhoods. In brief, scholarly work on religion and the internet consists of an analysis of religion both as being mediated and as a mediating actor itself. Not surprisingly, in the heterogeneous range of these studies, there are a greater number of studies targeted at specific cases (O’Leary, 1996; Hadden and Cowan, 2000; Mitchell and Marriage, 2003; Hackett, 2005; Scheitle, 2005; Lappin, 2010; Oren, 2011) than generic surveys (Campbell, 2005, 2013). The question of belief and conversion has also been studied through surveys on the dynamics of religion in these digital universes (Dawson and Cowan, 2004).

Another perspective, somewhat more applied and specific, consists in studying the incorporation of the religious in software programs, games, or web tools (Bainbridge, 2007; Wyche et al., 2009; Bainbridge, 2010a, 2013). The objective is to see how the integration of a religious dimension into certain software programs gives them a new facet or leads to an evolution in their usage or in their audience.

A third approach is the study of religious virtual communities (Helland, 2000; Brasher, 2001; Dawson, 2004; Bainbridge, 2006; Kabiiruan et al., 2011). From this perspective, researchers are interested in online communities that exist, organize themselves, and act completely virtually, using digital media. These can be communities related to existing organized religions or new religious communities essentially anchoring their activity online. In both cases, by the explicitly religious or spiritual nature of their practices, from an emic point of view, they fall within the traditional field of the study of religion.

A final category of studies, more recent and more limited in number, separates itself from these previous approaches. In the vein of what is known as analogical religion, a small number of researchers consider behaviors vis-à-vis the internet (addiction, devotion, etc.) as if they were a religion in themselves. In other words, virtual practices are analogically close to religious practices. This functionalist approach thus considers digital practices, and more typically the frequenting of these virtual universes, as analogically religious postures. Cyber religion, implicit religion on the internet, and cyber spirituality are terms that attempt to capture the overlapping of virtual practices and religious logics (Hojsgaard, 2005; Pärna, 2010; Zijderveld, 2008; Wagner, 2012). It is with this perspective that we frame our approach to virtual worlds and to World of Warcraft in particular (Servais, 2013).

Ethnography inside World of Warcraft

Among all the metaverses ² , more commonly referred to as virtual worlds, Azeroth, the name of the World of Warcraft, holds a special position. ³ In fact, since the game’s release in 2004, it has become one of the dominant videogaming universes. Far in front of its competitors, WoW is now a social phenomenon, having developed a specific culture amongst its aficionados. It represents, to some extent, the archetype of the new multi-player games, having integrated a social dimension alongside its recreational purpose. As a result, it has seen the creation of electronic tribes (Adams and Smith, 2008).

WoW is a game with millions of players. The subscribers are divided by servers (called realms), on a geographical and linguistic basis. The francophone server, Varimathras, was the principal object of our research. It is a consistent world of play, which operates practically around the clock. Thus, we can speak of it as a parallel universe. At any moment, in the WoW world, there are events happening, as in everyday worldly life. The scenography in WoW is a medieval fantasy, a classical universe for role play anchored in an environment that cleverly balances the competitive and the collaborative. The gamers can compete among themselves (Players versus Players, called PvP) or compete together against computer-controlled creatures (Players versus Environment, called PvE). Each realm is governed by one of these two modes of play. Varimathras is a PvE server, favoring cooperation against the computer. At a certain level, independent gamers are required by the rules of the game to join a guild. These more or less united groups vary from a dozen to millions of players.

This metaverse was the object of two principal monographs published in 2010, My life as a night elf priest by Bonnie Nardi, and William Bainbridge’s The Warcraft civilization (2010b). Although both works started as socio-anthropological inquiries, the results speak of their implications.

Before going further into the exploration of this metaverse, I shall present the theoretical and methodological background to my approach. The first assumption on which this study is based is that WoW is a technical but ‘open-ended’ space (Malaby, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006; Kow and Nardi, 2009). This means that in spite of the constraints imposed by the game designers (rules and affordance), the users re-appropriate the space in their own way (norms and praxis).

My second assumption is that the users of this virtual world are guided in their actions by a project of axiological coherence which, therefore, generates amongst them a process of filtration of their multiple virtual identities (avatars) (Rosas and Dhen, 2011). The activation of these identities is manifested in the highlighting of certain characteristics, to the detriment of others, according to each context (Boellstorff, 2008).

My third assumption is that there is porosity between life in the game (In Game or IG) and life in the real world (In Real Life or IRL) (Castronova, 2005; Nardi, 2010) – in other words, that these universes are not self-contained worlds. De facto, the practitioner himself interfaces between multiple realities: the reality of the metaverse in which he participates and the reality of the actual world.

The last assumption I make is that a particular social reality flourishes in these metaverses, conveyed particularly by the emergence of veritable virtual collectivities, often anchored none the less in a ‘down to earth’ space (Ducheneaut et al., 2006a, 2006b, 2007).

The complexity and novelty of these human groups, their small size, and the weight of their imagined values, as well as their multiple individual and collective identities conjoined with other realities, justified the primary use of ethnographic work in the field. The reference method for this work is what some have called a game ethnography (Bainbridge, 2000, 2007; Boellstorff, 2009).

However, few researchers limit themselves to a single ethnographic approach. In fact, each different perspective provides its own share of information. For my part, I combined the following three: a comparison of the discourses of French-speaking online gaming communities regarding religious themes, an analysis of the religious phenomena deployed within WoW, and the impact of offline events, including funerals, as a pretext to study the religious dimension of the game.

This multi-faceted approach allowed me to supplement my participant observation with information from the hundreds of pages on francophone gamer forums and on francophone guild websites ⁴ , together with 40 interviews conducted via software like Team Speak and Skype, or through chat integrated into the game. In practical terms, in the tradition developed by George Marcus (1995, 1998), this means a definitive survey of the numerous sites of the two worlds (Hine, 2007), and an effective tracking of the practitioners, all of them limited to the francophone world.

Religion and WoW

Analyzing the religious in WoW implies locating and identifying it without ambiguity. What are the ostensible or implicit signs of religion in the game? The first finding goes without saying. Azeroth is a universe steeped in imaginary religion. When a character dies in the game, and this happens all the time, an ‘angel’ (a computer agent) resuscitates him. This places players in the presence of a morphologically religious symbolism. Another illustration is the existence of various characters related to religious characters: a paladin, a druid, a shaman, and a priest. In fact, all these characters possess the power to heal other players. An altruistic dimension is thus attributed to the capabilities of these religious figures.

Numerous games also have elements that are often present in the religious morphology. For instance, the background is decorated with buildings, which, even if they do not have crosses, crescents, or candelabra, are related, by their form and architecture, to religious edifices. It is the same with cemeteries, where no explicit signs of religion appear, but their appearance answers nonetheless to religious morphology. Religion is also to be found in the cultural references implied by a specific form of building or structure like the Cathedral of Stormwind or the many chapels or temples surrounding Azeroth. The game’s design aims at a sort of pluralism, thanks to the absence of any explicit signs. However, in the light of global cultural referents, we know that these act as religious spaces. We observe the presence of spaces with religious morphology, which are to all intents and purposes culturally religious. In addition, religious functions are present, but again, there are no precise equivalents in the actual world. Religion is therefore seen as both spatial background and mythography (Bernauer, 2009; Bainbridge (2010b) dedicates a whole chapter to this subject).

This raises several questions: Is there a connection between the chosen motifs of the characters and the personal spiritual aspirations of the players? Do they enact these ceremonies for personal religious reasons or is this merely a ceremonial role-play? In the next section we will see that there are multiple answers to these questions.

Another interpretation would be to consider this virtual universe itself analogically as a religion. Functionally, it answers the same questions as religions, questions on the signification of life, of death, of suffering, of being, etc. (Servais, 2013: 107–108). World of Warcraft thus forms a religion out of the answers that the virtual universe gives to these fundamental questions. This idea is not so far away from Gaon’s discussion on digital worlds as artificial paradises (Gaon, 2007). The sacred thus emerges at the very heart of the digital (Aupers and Houtman, 2010). Certain practitioners, who might be termed ‘hardcore’ players, have a sense of immanent sacredness emerging from the game.

But this perspective differs from theorizing the internet as a religion in the sense that the purpose of the analogy is not to generalize about, but to better understand the empirical case. Analogies of this kind are intended to build not an internet theory but an anthropology based primarily on ethnography, an empirically based description, where the analogy will simply enlighten the interpretation. Adam Perkins, in his Master’s thesis, is amongst those who have best perceived this purpose attributed to WoW (Perkins, 2011). In his work, an action of collective guild war, raiding, becomes the collective ritual in which the religious experience dwells. ⁵

My fieldwork took me further along this line of reasoning. I discovered ceremonies in the game that had not been included by the game designers as part of the narration (outside the imposed/regulated framework of the game). These were rituals that the players had developed between themselves and that they experienced collectively through their avatars. They included marriage ceremonies between players from the same guild and funerals. Within these rituals, the individuals involved must embody their characters as much as possible during their immersion in the game. A well known German research group exploring religions in virtual worlds ⁶ worked on rituality in cyberspaces in which weddings occupied a central position (Radde-Antweiler, 2007: 185–196, 2010: 328–353). Radde-Antweiler sees these weddings as an emblematic case of ritual transfer from the actual world to the virtual world (see also Heidbrink, 2007: 175–184). This attitude assumes that rituals are polymorphic and change in relation to the context (indexicality) of realization. In other words, the specific affordance and contextual constraints define an implementational context, constraining the rite and redeploying it. To some extent the context change leads to a ritual do-it-yourself-ism (Christians and Servais, 2005: 275–279), which, far from being a particular case or singular moment, is the characteristic par excellence of human ritual practice.

Funerals

If weddings are more common than funerals (Servais, 2013), these are no less popular. For instance, the commemorations in China and Korea are particularly well known in the WoW community and link the virtual and actual worlds.

The issue of death in video games has been the subject of several studies. Most scholars approach it from the same angle: death as conceived by the game designers (Grellier, 2005; Klastrup, 2006, 2007, 2008; Bacqué, 2011; Gibbs et al., 2012 ; Bainbridge, 2013: 239–263). It is essentially virtual death that has caught the attention of the researchers. How is this death represented? What does it mean? In short, what is the concept of death found in these digital universes? Death is thus analyzed as a product, shaped by the programmers. The practices of the players themselves do not directly attract attention; they are seen merely as addressing the issue of death as docile participants in a preformatted world. My research, however, showed that gamers are rarely passive users. Often, they create their own logic for the game, assigning to it meanings far exceeding those envisaged by the game’s designers. Furthermore, they often integrate personal elements of their lives into the games, thus bringing new dimensions to the gaming experience.

Funeral ceremonies within WoW

In most cases, the rites of intensive gamers are events that pay homage to a virtual friend who has died in the actual world. In short, the physical death of a human being leads to a virtual ceremony.

Forms vary widely; funerals can take place in a natural environment, such as alongside a lake, or in a religious edifice. The Stormwind cathedral is probably the most commonly utilized edifice. These happenings, when they are public, may assemble from a few to nearly a hundred people, but the majority are organized by closed groups and so remain small-scale.

The form of the ceremony itself is also highly variable. It might consist of songs for the person lost, public speeches, or simply a gathering of avatars in the same place, in silence. In some cases, the deceased is a work colleague or a friend, but often, the majority of gamers do not know the deceased outside of their digital relationship. In many cases, relatives of the deceased are involved, including members of the dead player’s guild. Virtual funerals thus involve a personal dynamic among the players (Berry, 2012: 164–167). In one case I analyzed, the ceremony was symbolically located in a peaceful area, Moonglade, outside the traditional martial logic of the game, to attract a maximum of participants. The celebration rallied around 50 players from several guilds and consisted of a commemorative walk followed by a moment of silence and respect.

While investigating the issue of funerals within WoW, I chanced upon a series of funeral announcements on the game’s forum, such as ‘A Special Funeral: WoWers Mourn a Dead Fellow At Cathedral.’ These notifications led me to a new vision of the rites in WoW. These ceremonies, created by players for deceased relations in actual life, undeniably have a religious dimension.

During an informal discussion at the beginning of 2012 at the University of California-Irvine, a WoW designer admitted: ‘We had a problem with the funerals. We didn’t allow religious rituality or explicit religious messages in the game in order to avoid religious tensions but the players developed their own practices in new forms.’ This statement acknowledges the evident presence of religiosity in the funeral ceremonies, in more than an anecdotal manner.

In fact, this type of practice was not new, despite its being difficult to date precisely. As early as October 2005, an anecdote on a public gamers’ site attested to this ritual practice:

It was just yesterday that our LanGamers colleagues attracted our attention to a rather strange affair, linked to the community of World of Warcraft players in China. According to our colleagues, and the web site of China View, an inveterate player of World of Warcraft had died, from staying in front of her computer for too long. Although cases of the death of gamers addicted to MMORPG [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games] are becoming, unfortunately, less and less of a press scoop, the story told here by our colleagues gives an idea of the peculiarity of the MMORPG gaming communities. The girl, named ‘Snowly’, died last month after having played the Blizzard game non-stop for several days in a row. Shortly before her death, she declared to her community that she had to tackle a phase of the game as delicate as it was difficult, and a few hours before her death, she admitted that she felt ‘very tired’. Then, the story becomes very strange: only a week after her death, a funeral service was openly organized in the virtual world, and avatars of players came together around the memory of Snowly. ⁷

Whether this site reports an actual event or one that has been invented, it attests to the existence of the phenomenon. A collective funeral rite, in the vast majority of societies, has some sort of relation to the spiritual or religious. Analyzing this type of event thus appears a perfectly appropriate means of trying to determine more precisely the potentially religious nature of these virtual practices.

The existence of such virtual practices could be considered as a religious innovation despite the fact that they are rituals without any physical presence, but rather involving a collective presence and gestures in a digital space. Furthermore, its participants explicitly report a sense of experiencing a live event that concerns actual life, even if it is lived through an avatar in a virtual world. This is not a life by proxy; it is authentic life, but as lived through a new medium, the metaverse. It is not just a ritual transfer from one world to another but a true innovation, partly because the ceremony is specific, never culturally or generationally homogeneous, and partly because the technical constraints of the interface are highly restrictive in this domain. Moreover, the ‘will’ of the deceased is often, as here, connected to the game and its particular logic. So the ‘bricolage’ is original, due to this conjunction between the limitations of affordance, the diversity and innovativeness of the event, and the project of the dead person.

Controversy

To develop my hypothesis that these funerals are lived spiritual experiences, and following the insights of Heidbrink et al. (2011) into contested rituals, I have chosen a specific controversy as an indicator of the genuinely experiential nature of these events.

During his interview, the aforementioned designer explicitly referred to an investigation undertaken by the company that produces WoW into players’ expectations of funeral ceremonies. This led to a number of problems. In particular, the helpdesks found themselves confronted with a situation on the PvP server where the rules of the game were being respected but players were experiencing a problem – the case of the Serenity Now guild. ⁸

In 2006, an inveterate player on the American server Illidan unexpectedly died. A virtual ceremony to pay tribute to her was organized by her WoW guild. The public announcement of this ceremony read:

On Tuesday of February 28th Illidan lost not only a good mage, but a good person. For those who knew her, Fayejin was one of the nicest people you could ever meet. On Tuesday she suffered from a stroke and passed away later that night.

I’m making this post basically to inform everyone that might have knew [sic] her. Also tomorrow, at 5:30 server time March, 4^th we will have an in game memorial for her so that her friends can pay their respects. We will be having it at the Frostfire Hot Springs in Winterspring, because she loved to fish in the game (she liked the sound of the water, it was calming for her and she loved snow).

If you would like to come show your respects please do. Thanks everyone ⁹

To summarize the events, on March 4, 2006, a relative of the deceased took control of her avatar, and brought the character to the designated place. He had the character lie down beside the stretch of water. Then, the 30 or so avatars that were present, who were all from the Horde faction of the guild Serenity Now, formed a line to pay silent homage to the deceased, in front of her digital body lying there.

But one group from the other faction of the alliance decided to intervene in the event. Its members planned a surprise commando operation to put an end to what they thought of as a masquerade. Heavily armed and clad in their best armor, the group fell upon the defenseless meditators. The massacre was total.

The guild recorded the whole scene on video and put the clip on Google Video and YouTube. ¹⁰ The footage spread like wildfire over the internet, and the incident generated many reactions from all directions. A debate, not only animated but at times acrimonious, broke out within the WoW community. The forums were assailed with opinions as to whether the ceremony or attack had been legitimate. Francophone fora were also extensively affected by this dispute.

Analysis

This famous scenario has been the object of ethical reflections aiming to establish whether the attitude of the attackers was or was not justifiable (Evans, 2009) and where the border with reality lies in MMORPG (Gibbs et al., 2013). Although this problematic is fascinating, it is not our particular focus. However, the debate gives us some elements with which to respond to the question I raised regarding the spiritual or religious nature of the ritual in question.

But let us return for a moment to the ceremony itself, in the context of the virtual world in which it took place. Its location was chosen to respect the will of the deceased. This is why her guild publicly undertook to organize this collective ritual in a place in which open war prevails (a PvP zone), as opposed to a zone dedicated to truce or at least ritualized conflict. The massive attack by the opposing faction at the height of the ceremony was therefore in accordance with the rules of the game. An act of war can be qualified as ‘normal’ or even as ‘GG’ (Good Game) if it accomplishes an objective according to the logic of the game. Given the controversy surrounding this event, this purely logical perspective was evidently not shared by all the gamers.

Indeed, in their reaction to this hostile act, the defenders of the ceremony invoked a notion that they considered superior to the rules of the game: the right to have a positive experience in playing the game. In fact, there is a code of behavior for every player of WoW, whose first objective is to promote a pleasant gaming experience for other participants. To blatantly spoil the experience of others is thus against the spirit of the game. One may, of course, dispute the meaning of ‘positive gaming experience.’ The question remained, however, whether or not the attack was appropriate behavior – a question that gave rise to many ethical debates (Gibbs et al., 2013).

In a broader sense, the funeral had brought to the surface conceptions of ritual that were in keeping with the real life of the practitioners, thereby creating a clear and major opposition between ‘in the spirit of the game’ and ‘in the spirit of real life.’

There are other ways to make assertions regarding the connection between the virtual and IRL besides ruining a homage. Everyone can think what he wants; me, I agree with the people who were paying homage and it is not a bad way to say goodbye if we can’t do it in real life. (posted by A on 04.26.2006 at 7:18 pm) ¹¹

For others, it was a game period; in other words, a virtual experience that should be detached from all contexts of actual life. For them, a ‘positive experience’ meant living completely in the game, and not reflecting reality in the virtual actions of the game.

What right did they have to interrupt the ceremony? The right of a gamer, perhaps? The right of a gamer to a game of war, of combat, which is furthermore on a pvp server … The more I think about it, the more I tell myself that it was a ‘pvp opportunity not to be missed.’ (posted by G on 04.26.2006 at 8:23 pm) ¹¹

In short, for G, as for other players, WoW is above all a game, a war game in fact, that does not leave room for the development of sociability if it is not in purely gaming circumstances.

Still others recognized that the attack had taken place in the virtual world but also emphasized the positive and human side of this type of celebration:

Everyone does what he wants; if the players decide to have a last homage to a deceased friend it’s their right. As for the attack on a server dedicated to that: Personally, I wouldn’t have done it because maybe it’s the only way that these gamers had to pay their respects to her. All these gamers do not know her physically … it’s a nice gesture. I would be proud if my gamer ‘friends’ and my guild did this for me (posted by K 04.26.2006 at 7:18 pm) ¹¹

We can distinguish here three conceptions of participating in Azeroth, the Warcraft universe. Some simply play there, and consequently their involvement is within this limited framework, whereas others almost literally live there. In this second perspective, WoW becomes a social universe like any other – part of the subjective lives of the practitioner. For the third kind of player, WoW remains a game, but a special game, a passion that involves the player intensely. The nature of the personal involvement of each participant plays a significant role.

These conflicting attitudes explain the scandal and acrimony that was aroused. To some, the funeral was a quasi-sacred act, for it involved the integrity of the deceased individual and those considered her closest friends. From this angle, respect for the dead and her family becomes a reference value, regardless of the place in which it is paid, virtual or actual. No distinction or hierarchy between physical and virtual relationships is made.

Yet for others, none of these considerations is relevant, and the whole affair was a parody of reality. One may play at being ‘friends,’ which is part of the game, but this does not extend to sentiments such as respect and honor. This second conception clearly organizes actual and virtual relationships into a hierarchy. And the virtual is clearly held to be qualitatively inferior.

Many went as far as to label the ceremony ‘No Life,’ a stigma meaning that it was conducted by individuals who think they are more real in the virtual world than in the actual world. Therefore, they deserved to be put back in their place in the reality hierarchy, even violently so. For those who share this attitude, the end of an individual entails the end of an avatar, a fellow traveler known only by means of digital mediation. However, this position, implying a denial of supposed reality, has been the subject of multiple, and often cynical, critiques, and a position from which the majority of players wish to distance themselves. What is significant here is that this ‘No Life’ position, which is rarely defended openly on the forums because it is considered to be shameful, is similar to a religious interpretation in that it considers the rite in question here as having an exceptional nature. It is not some trivial practice, but a serious, grave act, full of symbolism and meaning, in some way sacred.

Between these two extreme positions, for the majority of my informants and interlocutors the event was a memorial ceremony, at which people remember and pay their respects to someone. Although these are technically the same purposes as those of a classically ‘religious’ ceremony, the status of the ritual in question is, above all, human. The goal is to grieve, mourn a friend, and help the family to mourn by being there with them; to commemorate a gamer, who was also a virtual friend – a valued person the mourners had, virtually, attachments to and memories of.

This does not prevent the advocates of this stance from deploring the brutality of the attack, which they felt was inappropriate regardless of one’s opinion on the nature of the ritual itself. An excerpt from one of the guild members in the field, called E, is symptomatic of this attitude:

… no matter what camp I am in, I don’t appreciate it … if you killed my character because I wanted to pay homage to my friend in the game that we all loved, I would be disgusted … even if it’s virtual, and pixels that you kill, there is symbolism in it ¹²

It is our human consciousness that demands an ‘out game’ attitude in this particular context. But in a universe populated by players from every culture and origin, what does the term ‘symbolic’ mean? The actors in this debate are constantly using identical terms that they assume to have the same implicit meanings for all the players involved, but in this case it certainly does not have a single substantial meaning.

Another example is the reference to the value of ‘respect.’ The participants in the debate overuse this seemingly convenient and conventional term. However, it clearly means different things to different people. In the gamer’s camp, respect means respect for the game. Thus, a respectful attitude is to allow the logic of the game to unfold without the invasion of references exogenous to the game. Conversely, respect in the minds of the mourners means above all respect for the deceased and her memory.

The fundamental question was posed by a weekly gamer called C: ‘Can we, and should we, transpose the moral rules of “real” life to virtual life?’

Conclusion

Two main ideas have emerged from our exploration of this topic. First, it can be seen that the status of this funeral ceremony depends upon the level of identification that players have with their avatar. To WoW residents, meaning practitioners who consider the metaverse as an integral part of their social life and their avatars as emulations of themselves, WoW is a place to live, which can constitute all facets of reality, including the spiritual and the religious. To the most intense residents, considered by some participants as ‘No Life,’ such ceremonies are, at least analogously, religious. They subscribe to an immanent conception of religion, anchored in the experience lived within the virtual universe, and respond to the same fundamental questions of existence which traditional religions seek to answer. In the incident under discussion, we see a questioning about death and all that it implies: the destiny of the individual, the suffering of loved ones, the meaning of existence, etc.

Second, the virtualization of this type of funeral ceremony transforms religious logic. The classic funeral rite, in the Christian religious configuration, involves the displacement of a physical body, the cadaver, toward a virtual future, resurrection. An institutional celebrant (the priest) thus invokes the virtual (divinity) to virtualize a dead body (a resurrected body). This hope for a future of the deceased permits the mourners left behind to come to terms with the departure of a loved one. A secularized logic has now replaced this scheme. In the absence of certainty about the afterlife, which has become somewhat hypothetical for most modern minds, and in a context of crisis in terms of the traditional meaning-creating institutions, new funerary devices focus on community celebration. They are targeted more towards the world of the living, towards life on Earth in the absence of certain life beyond, by honoring the memory of the deceased, and are an invitation to collectively mourn (Hiernaux and Servais, 2001, 2003; Osés Bermejo, 2013). The disappearance of the body (viz. the increasing popularity of cremation) or the exaltation of the deceased (grandiose graveyard ceremonies and personalized tombs) thus symbolically anchors this type of device first and foremost in a ‘material’ and one-worldly perspective. In fact, through the dematerialization of the burnt body or the personalization of the ceremony and of the place of burial, the materiality of the symbols becomes the primary referent of these devices that manage death. For some, the virtual no longer exists.

Virtual ceremonies thus bring us back to a new logic. The digital body of the deceased constitutes, in a way, corporal dematerialization prior to the ceremony. During such an event, the celebration is no longer guided by the material dimension of the body or of its memory, but focuses on the social commemoration of the deceased and organizes the community’s process of mourning. The digital body of the dead person is no longer the principal subject of the ceremony. In one sense, the deceased is instrumentalized in order to improve solidarity in the virtual group (Despret, 2014: 4–23). It is a medium that aims above all to preserve the memory of and maintain an emotional link with the deceased (Ryan, 2012) and to provide moral support to loved ones: she was a nice person, we organized the ceremony in the place she liked, we remember what she liked to do. In place of the soteriological and institutional transcendence of yore, we are now heading towards funerals as an expression of social and relational immanence.