This hits close to home to me. I am disabled now (but I still work, of course!), but I wasn't then.
However I spent 10000s of hours on an online MUD called Godwars Apocalypse. I spent nearly all of my time helping people, finding and exploiting bugs, helping the game designers and programmers and just playing the game.
Then for reasons I can't at all recall, I had stopped playing the game for a while. In the interim, someone had accessed my account (seemed to have been from my main computer in fact. Cute practical joke :\ ) and told everyone that I had died.
I came back months later to play some more and I found out there were vigils, an entire area created for and named after me as if I was the in-game lore itself. Players were incredibly confused when I said it was me, and able to prove it by logging into all of my accounts and discuss previous private interactions in an intimate manner with a variety of players.
I was _incredibly_ touched. I didn't realize anyone cared that I existed. I just played the game and tried to make it a better place for the few hundred people that also enjoyed sitting in front of a black zMUD screen for 12+ hours a day.
That day that I came back truly changed my life. Outside of the game I was an in-compassionate jackass. I was crass and heartless. After that day I realized that every little thing you can do can mean something to a lot of people. It really did form my life (and my eventual hobbies and profession as an adult).
BUT.
I also learned something unfortunate.
Days later, when it was found out that "I had lied" (I did not! I didn't even know anything about me "dying") because "the IPs matched", everything was torn down. My characters were gutted. I was made fun of and I lost real life friends.
I became completely ostracized from the game, the community and 2 other gaming communities close to it. I was destroyed. I lost everything. Quite literally everything that mattered to me in my adolescent life.
Nobody believed me that I did not try to deceive them (and was wholly unaware of the situation until I logged back in). Nobody cared about the 10000s of hours I spent building the community, helping newbies (with in-game items I spent 100s of hours farming myself) or how much time I spent working testing the game so others could have a better experience.
I've always held this as a moment of, "They don't care about you until you're gone, but when you're back they go back to not caring again."
It did lead to my first programming job that really mattered to a group of people (another MUD, Cursed Lands), and my first major teaching experiences. Guess what my profession is now?
Fast forward to my mid-20s and I was diagnosed with a rather terrible chronic disease (I will likely die because of it, but not from it). I once again manage a community (of 10000s) of people as a hobby and after reading this article I can see what happened to Mats happening to me.
It makes me about as happy as it makes me sad. Hopefully I do a good enough job in enriching people's lives to matter as much as Mats did, or even as I did at one time.
And hopefully my brother/father/mother/friend doesn't decide to play a prank on me again.
As an extension to this, I'd like to clarify on the part where I mentioned that I lost real life friends.
Someone online went out of their way to 'dox' me (in the early 90s no less!) and contact everyone they could that may know me.
Awful things were said. A wide variety of things from me being a practicing satanist (with a screenshot of me role playing in game) to some strange elaborate claim that I had tried to defraud people online.
Quite the rollercoaster for someone that just wanted to go home and MUD every day after school.
However I spent 10000s of hours on an online MUD called Godwars Apocalypse. I spent nearly all of my time helping people, finding and exploiting bugs, helping the game designers and programmers and just playing the game.
Then for reasons I can't at all recall, I had stopped playing the game for a while. In the interim, someone had accessed my account (seemed to have been from my main computer in fact. Cute practical joke :\ ) and told everyone that I had died.
I came back months later to play some more and I found out there were vigils, an entire area created for and named after me as if I was the in-game lore itself. Players were incredibly confused when I said it was me, and able to prove it by logging into all of my accounts and discuss previous private interactions in an intimate manner with a variety of players.
I was _incredibly_ touched. I didn't realize anyone cared that I existed. I just played the game and tried to make it a better place for the few hundred people that also enjoyed sitting in front of a black zMUD screen for 12+ hours a day.
That day that I came back truly changed my life. Outside of the game I was an in-compassionate jackass. I was crass and heartless. After that day I realized that every little thing you can do can mean something to a lot of people. It really did form my life (and my eventual hobbies and profession as an adult).
BUT.
I also learned something unfortunate.
Days later, when it was found out that "I had lied" (I did not! I didn't even know anything about me "dying") because "the IPs matched", everything was torn down. My characters were gutted. I was made fun of and I lost real life friends.
I became completely ostracized from the game, the community and 2 other gaming communities close to it. I was destroyed. I lost everything. Quite literally everything that mattered to me in my adolescent life.
Nobody believed me that I did not try to deceive them (and was wholly unaware of the situation until I logged back in). Nobody cared about the 10000s of hours I spent building the community, helping newbies (with in-game items I spent 100s of hours farming myself) or how much time I spent working testing the game so others could have a better experience.
I've always held this as a moment of, "They don't care about you until you're gone, but when you're back they go back to not caring again."
It did lead to my first programming job that really mattered to a group of people (another MUD, Cursed Lands), and my first major teaching experiences. Guess what my profession is now?
Fast forward to my mid-20s and I was diagnosed with a rather terrible chronic disease (I will likely die because of it, but not from it). I once again manage a community (of 10000s) of people as a hobby and after reading this article I can see what happened to Mats happening to me.
It makes me about as happy as it makes me sad. Hopefully I do a good enough job in enriching people's lives to matter as much as Mats did, or even as I did at one time.
And hopefully my brother/father/mother/friend doesn't decide to play a prank on me again.