Only when Mats was dead did his parents understand the value of his game | Hacker News Reader

Only when Mats was dead did his parents understand the value of his game

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135 pointsNegatioN25 comments

Thank you for translating. I am one of those players in Starlight and good gods, do we ever miss Mats. I am happy more people might read this and realize that online games that promote social interaction open up a world of possibilities for people who might otherwise not have that option. Of course there's always the other side of the coin. Of course the news likes to focus on problems, but THIS is the side of the coin that truly matters: friendships forged, lives enriched through a game in which distance no longer matters.

I was a bit apprehensive about posting a google translated article, as some parts may be slightly off, so it's great to see some people enjoyed it despite that.

It's originally written by Norway's national broadcasting (NRK), and since the art/pictures don't seem to be included in the translated version, here's the original link for anyone who wants to check it out: https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/forst-da-mats-var-dod_-fors...

It has a few images of Mats, a few of his guildmates and a few drawings which really help bring the story to life.

Best thing I read today. Thanks for posting. I would have been hard pressed to read it aloud.

I'm Norwegian and I realised half way through that I could just read it in the original language.

Human translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/akbdug/only_when_mats_...

Amazing article, thanks for posting.

After seeing your comment here, it’s not clear why some sentences were broken. But I never realized that it was an auto-translated text. Incredible.

Very nice article. Thanks for posting.

“I - or Rumor, then - acted a little on impulse; jumped out of the bushes and snatched the hat off Ibelin. Stay silent for a moment, we looked at each other. Then I ran away with his hat, without thought for where I ran, says Lisette and smiles.”

You can’t do that in the game.

Too bad that's all you were able to take away. I lived a similar childhood with parents who to this day don't understand how much my online friends meant to me. This article really spoke to me.

It's possible that this was done entirely through chat. Ie/ Rumor types " Snatches Hat " in chat. As long as both players agree that what's typed in chat is what happened, it doesn't matter if the game actually has an animation to support it.

I used to MUD back in the day and there were role players who were very much into the character, and if you typed "snatches hat", it doesn't matter if the game didn't have support for it, that's what happened.

Given that this wasn't rare, it seems likely that that's what happened.

Yup. WoW has special servers marked for roleplaying (as opposed to the more achievement-oriented "normal" servers), and it sounds like they were playing on one of those.

Oh, I didn't know that, thanks. Yeah, that must be what happened then.

I think it is a bit sad that the only connection people really had to him was in the gaming world. I doubly think that it is sad that acceptance came only in the form of a denial of sorts of his actual reality.

I guess this is part of what the article tries to comment on though. The traditional viewpoint is: This is denial of reality, and it's sad.

But players themselves often just see it more as an extension of themselves, where it easier to find like-minded individuals, or others who see themselves like outcasts in some way. The fact that they're banding together in virtual space is in my eyes not necessarily a negative, although excessive gaming to run away from other responsibilities can be negative.

I think Mats was very aware of his own reality, and even seemed to write prose about how these two worlds contrasted for him on his blog (which I can't find directly atm, so I'm just basing that on the excerpts in the article).

The connections he made with people, were real, even though the space he made them in was man-made, abstract or non-real. Which is probably something that could not easily be achieved to this degree with the limitations he had in the physical world.

A very moving story! Inspiring to see the rich emotional connections Mats made in his virtual life that was not possible in his real life due to his physical limitations.

This is translated by a machine, not a person.

this was nice to read, thanks for posting

That was a great read, very hard to read because I could imagine where it was going. Makes me feel like I have a knot in my throat. :(

There's a netflix show called Dad of Light:

https://www.netflix.com/sg/title/80178543

Based on a true story, it's worth watching.

The blog was translated:

https://transnoteblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/the-father-of...

That is a great read/translate.

Didn't it read as if translated by a native English speaker? I thought so too. Amazingly adept/scary, with only one really tiny niggle exception for the quoted "Uff" that transliterates better than it translates.

I was halfway through before I thought, "this reads like it was written by an ESL author." I scrolled up to look at the author's name, and only then noticed that it was machine-translated. Amazing job on the translation. Also a good story.

The structure of Norwegian and English are closely related. Most times you end up with something legible by translating each word directly without accounting for context.

The structure of the English was very good, but there was a few places where it seemed to translate Norwegian as if it was Swedish, and quite a few places where it seemed to "guess" what a word meant.

In most cases it didn't loose much of the meaning, but the sentence translated as "It was even nicer that Mats himself, who was lying in the white coffin, had not met these people either." should be translated more like: "Even stranger was that Mats himself ..." or possibly "The only thing more strange was ..." Not fluent in Norwegian so I don't know for sure. But as a Swedish speaker I'm well aware that "rar" ( stem of rarere ) is not translated as nice, as it's one of the more common causes for miscommunication with out western neighbors. In Norwegian "rar" a false cognate with the Swedish "rar", which actually means nice. However, they likely also share common etymological roots, so are cognate and false cognate with each other simultaneously.

It's amazing to see what's happened to English "nice" itself over the history of the word https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice

I think technically in the case you describe the two words are true cognates, but with different meanings. Cognate means that they share an etymology, not necessarily that they share an etymology and a present-day meaning. Wikipedia distinguishes false friends from false cognates this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

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