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Comment by bdjsiqoocwk | Hacker News Reader

If this was such a big part of their son's life, how come they weren't aware?

I'm asking this more to wonder out loud whether I'm in need of some introspection than to blame them.

Because most people aren't that aware of their friends and relatives' hobbies and interests, nor the specifics about how they work. So if that person doesn't speak openly about them (and let's face it, most people won't simply because the other person won't find the topic that interesting), then they'll only know the most basic aspects.

Like, someone I'm friends with regularly goes to the climbing gym. I vaguely remember being told which gym it was at one point, and I know the sport they partake in, but that's basically it. I don't know if they've got any friends or acquaintances they hang out with each time they go, if they go to events related to it, whether they discuss it online, etc.

And the same goes with what most people (friends and parents included) know about me and my own hobbies and interests too. They might know some of the things I'm interested in and some of the people I'm friends with, but it's certainly not all of them.

In general, people tend not to know everything (or often, even that much in general) about their friends and loved ones. They know what they're willing to talk about/have bothered discussing, and that's usually it.

Would you say "Our lives have been digitally unbundled" be accurate characterization?

Quite possibly. The internet's existence means it's a lot easier to have hobbies and interests and friendships that your real life friends and family don't know about, that's for sure.

I think to parents at least to millennials, the idea of an MMORPG is just even more foreign than it is to parents to gen z or gen alpha.

WoW was maybe not the first big title but it was the first that really put the genre into the mainstream. A genre inspired by the novelty of virtual worlds. I think to them, their son just played a dumb video game and in the best case they weren’t necessarily supportive but also not against it. Just a weird thing he did that they didn’t understand.

How could they possible imagine that he spent his time in that world with people from all around the real world talking about the game and their life alike for hours on end. Being there for those people when life hit them and being able to expect the same in return like what you’d hope friends in the real world would do.

To my mother, all people online that talked to me when I was a teenager would be creepy old people trying to groom me. But the people I’ve met in those games are now my best friends. If I were religious, one of them would have been the godfather to my child.

Despite the obvious name, I find no reason not to engage in the custom of appointing a god parent despite the lack of belief in any of the gods.

You're pretty much onto the crux of the situation. Lets put it mildly, its a rare case that the parents of a disabled child/person truly understand their needs/desires/wishes/dreams. Its much more common that the barrier that appears between disabled and non-disabled people will persist, and will not get broken down. Most disabled people I know (and I am disabled myself) basically had to run away from home to get some degree of freedom. Its a rather sad thing, which involves a lot of things, mostly the trauma of the parents which they likely never overcome. And the desire of the disabled peerson to gain some independence. Which is usually not compatible with family.

That post really made me sad.

I'm not disabled and neither is anyone in my family. But my relationship with my parents was always bad. I never spent any time thinking about the lives of disabled people because they've always been such an alien reality to me, but I think if you'd asked me think about it I wouldve had the vague intuition that disabled at least had good relationships with their parents because how dependent/how much time they were forced to spend with them. Your comment about the trauma that parents never overcome added a really dark twist for me to the concept of "bad relationship with your parents".

Anyway thanks for sharing

And longing for a family that you could have had...

I find it that people who grew up with attentive parents just don't understand how one can not trust their parents, or what it is like to have to hide everything from them.

I think from their perspective, all they saw was a video game, they didn’t know that it involved intricate role-playing and community.

That's the thing.

WoW came out in 2004. What came before in a similar genre? Maybe Diablo II in 2000-2001. And while the Guild Halls were planned for D2 they never actually shipped. There were forums etc but nothing like the scale and possibility of WoW. There were no patterns for this before.

Ultima Online, Everquest, Lineage...Blizzard definitely had a leg up with their brand recognition which boosted the genre to new levels, but it really wasn't a new idea.

In 1997 UO had ~100 000 subscribers, in 2004 WoW had over a million. It's nowhere near the same.

This is a very common misconception, really. Yes, there are no new ideas. The fact that LG Prada sported a capacitive touch is only relevant for mansplaining. rewind.ai predates Microsoft Recall but who cares, really? The chances of an abusive spouse discovering it and using it to oppress further a woman is nil while Recall will be right in front of their eyes. AirTag was not the first stalking device but for sure it was the first to reach mass enough adaptation to get multiple women murdered. The list is endless.

That's exactly what his father said. They had thought it was just playing a game (he used the word 'competition' when he spoke about it).

EditAdd: And it's not strange. First, Mats had his own apartment, it wasn't like he was playing where his parents were walking past all the time. And secondly, every time he logged on to WoW he would spend the first 30 minutes running. So if anyone watched him when he started playing the would simply see a figure on a monitor running on a road, and keep running, and that was all.

It’s because, for those of us who exist in these realms - be it WoW, EQ, furries, whatever - we get very, very good at being discrete. There’s that initial excitement when we desperately want to share our joy with our parents or siblings, but all too often that joy is dashed by popular misconceptions, media sensationalism, and flat-out fabrications about “strangers online” and the like. I found solace in online communities as an introvert traumatized by repeated cross-country moves growing up, and when I tried sharing my online friends with my parents, they deleted my social messenger accounts at the time.

So that’s why this stuff often pops up as a “surprise” to those left behind, or comes across as a “double-life”. We often tried to open up and share ourselves, but were shut down for the unorthodox ways we found happiness or identity, and realized the best approach was hard segregation of the two.

Heck, it’s why I still don’t tie my meatspace and authentic selves together. The meatspace me is this reserved but honest engineer who just wants to make good systems that customers like using and be left alone, but the online dinosaur is…_starkly different_, more open and authentic, exuding more confidence and more empathy as well.

We’re unique creatures who adapt to our surroundings, but make no mistake: we always want to share our found happiness with others. Unfortunately, experience often dictates that sharing ourselves so completely is more likely than not to end up causing us great harm, and so we just don’t do it.

They were aware, but hadn't got the correct understanding. They had thought all the time that WoW was a competition, beating the machine.. like the video games they grew up with (and, er, I did), i.e. car racing games and the like. In other words, they weren't aware of the social aspect of the thing.

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