World of Warcraft: Gaming Accounts as a Monument of Immortality

No one is immortal, nobody can escape death. But what remains when we leave forever? A grieving family, people we have come to love, and last but not least our World of Warcraft account.

Unexpectedly often, death catches us faster than we would like. Unfortunately, we cannot just run from a spawn point 100 kilometers away to our corpse and get back up. No one can tell us what awaits us after death. The fact is, however, that we currently leave our game accounts behind on Earth.

At least, I have never come across a gaming dead person in a computer game. How could I? I doubt that the Wi-Fi signal from my FritzBox, despite the repeater in the hallway, reaches up to heaven. Even a 10-gigabit dedicated line would not stand up to the gigantic mass of people up there.

Problem after passing: We not only leave our identity on the internet, such as Facebook and Twitter profiles, but also our game accounts and active subscriptions. Of course, one could leave a will at a notary stating what happens to our user profiles. But who actually does that? In the end, the level 100 characters that we played for 5000 hours and are fully equipped will decay. Of course, only if the subscription expires.

Death itself cannot stop a subscription

We will eventually die on our own, unless our beloved wife gets wind of the life insurance policy. However, a game account does not die that quickly, especially if it is free-to-play.

[pullquote]A game account does not die that quickly[/pullquote]

There are two ways for the remaining relatives to put an end to it: Either they ask the respective manufacturer support to delete the account or it expires at the latest when the game servers are shut down. However, the publisher would have to go bankrupt or the game – let’s say – doesn’t come across well, and that can take some time.

For an account that requires a subscription, such as in the case of World of Warcraft, the situation is a bit different. As long as the numbers in the account are positive and the subscription is not canceled, the monthly costs continue. Here, you also contact the game’s support again. However, if our partner or wife plunders the joint account after our death to run off with a 26-year-old Latino lover, the subscription will end sooner or later on its own.

However, sometimes a WoW subscription really brings unusual surprises. Just like with the WoW player Mortisana

The story of Mortisana

Blizzard started in January 2015 to gift all players who had an uninterrupted subscription for a full ten years to “World of Warcraft” with a very special Orc statue. The WoW player Mortisana told her personal story in the official US forum of World of Warcraft. Although he has already passed away, her father received such a statue.

Mortisana played WoW together with her husband and her father from day one. However, the couple often took breaks, for example during pregnancy. Her father, on the other hand, was persistently and enthusiastically exploring Azeroth. After a stroke, he was physically impaired: “He did not leave the house very often, he could hardly walk. WoW was his world, his refuge. The game was one of the few things that gave him happiness,” writes Mortisana.

When her father died in March 2014, Mortisana not only canceled his subscription but also her own: “I could not log in without thinking of him.” The memories of the hours spent together in WoW kept bringing back the painful loss of her father . However, when her now 8-year-old son wanted to play WoW in December, she reactivated her father’s account: “Now I play with my son on the account that my father played so much. He would love that his grandson enjoys the game so much.”

In January of this year, Mortisana’s mother called and said that a package from Blizzard had arrived. Now you can guess three times what was inside:

Thank you Blizzard, I will always look at this statue and remember how much joy you brought my father and me.

We have earned a monument

Immortality is a goal that ancient kings and pharaohs aspired to – unfortunately, it didn’t work out, they now lie in a pyramid. Nevertheless, one remembers celebrities for decades because they have left music hits, mathematical equations, or big sculptures in the landscape – a monument indeed. If we do not achieve any super deeds, we only leave our user profile in computer games. And the 50,000 gold in small unnumbered coins in the bank in Orgrimmar.

But as we saw in the case of Mortisana, a remaining account is always good for a surprise. Now the only question remains whether I should mention my login details in my will? Especially since most of my created characters in all my MMOs are female, blonde, and busty. I don’t want to leave a bad impression of myself. Difficult…