You've probably read that Sean Smith, one of the US diplomats slain in the riots at the US Embassy in Libya, was an Eve Online player -- particularly in this excellent Wired article by Robert Beckhusen, who happens to be the son of Fred Beckhusen, a well known SL community member -- so here's a moving and fitting coda to that tragic news: Last night, Eve Online players staged a kind of in-game memorial for Smith, known there as “Vilerat”, in the form of cargo containers, re-purposed as virtual flowers, and dropped off by players from around the world. (Seen above, in a photo posted to Reddit last night by "blix65", a Redditor and fellow Eve player.) "It's the star at the center of the largest trade hub system in the game," he explains in the thread. "A bunch of players from have stopped by and jettisoned cargo containers named 'R.I.P. Vile Rat' as a memento. I didn't know him at all, but hearing of a regular dude who enjoys video games being killed so senselessly... just brings it home."
Somehow -- though it's happening in an spacefaring MMO -- it does. It's also a tragically ironic coda, because the riot itself was reportedly provoked by a video uploaded to YouTube. So an event with global repercussions that was sparked by one act of user-generated content, ended with another.
MSNBC has a good clip on Sean the man and the Eve Online gamer, too. As it happens, he was a diplomat in both worlds:
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Hat tip: Fred.
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R.I.P. VileRat!
Smith death is not a useless one as it will reminds Us all that there are still a lot of work to do in order to end the threat to Free World!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Great post
Posted by: Rubina Kousar | Saturday, September 24, 2016 at 04:21 AM