A question for the 21st Century: do Miis get funerals?

Something at the back of my mind warned me that this moment would come. A misery, literally, of my own creation. What started as a bit of fun has now turned decidedly bleak. An emotional dilemma for our digital age, and, so far as I can tell from a trawl of Google, not a single daft Los Angeles-based support group in sight.

Now, it is really not like Urban Dirt to get maudlin about things, but I recently lost a dearly beloved  grandfather, whose rather fine obituary can be found on The Times website here. He lived to a ripe age, led a full professorial life, was merrily writing his memoirs until the very end and died suddenly without pain. All very comforting. I returned to the UK and joined family, friends and his many admirers from the world of academia for a thoroughly fitting send-off: tea, cucumber sandwiches...I should probably not be, but have been down in the dumps ever since.

So much so, in fact, that since my return to Tokyo it has been some weeks since I switched on my Wii - and it's a dark old state if even Mario in a bumble bee suit can't shed a little cheer. But life moves on, I badly needed a Nintendo fix, so last night on it went...

My heart stopped, because there he was. My grandfather - the late Professor Geoffrey Lewis - wandering across the screen in Mii form. A smiling, blinking, stretching - dammit, living - incarnation of the old man. A faithful avatar thriving innocently in a cartoon world, with no idea its flesh-and-blood master was dead.

And I wondered why, for all its  collective ingenuity and brilliance, have the internet, the digital fantasyscapes and Nintendo's Mii world not done more to embrace the natural way of things? I can do my taxes online, so why not that other certainty of life?

Is it just because the internet has been "built" in its current form by people who, quite properly, are still young and concerned chiefly with living? That cannot last much longer. The net is now 15 years old and my 87- year old grandfather was one of its earliest adopters. Surely we are fast-approaching a time when the raw demographics of the web will scream the question "where do avatars go when their owners die of old age?"

For the time being, however, I am left with the question of what to do next with Professor Mii. The easiest thing, of course, would be to just leave him in cyberspace Mii world, still gambolling around with the rest of my Mii family and friends. But it seems frivolous. What was cute and hilarious when the avatar's owner lived is somehow unbecoming now he is not.

When I created the Mii of my grandfather, it was for a bit of a laugh. I always found it hugely entertaining to find him popping-up in any of the Nintendo titles that incorporated the Miis into the games themselves. Sometimes he was in the audience of a running-race, on other occasions a baseball referee. To play him at ping-pong, or to have him knock six bells out of my Mii mother-in-law in the Wii Sports boxing ring, was enormously comforting when you're a long way from home and you miss your family.

But only, I now discover, when the person the avatar represents is actually still alive. And Nintendo, for all of the company's genius, has ignored the harsh realities of life: it hasn't worked out an appropriate ceremony to mark the death of a Mii.

Currently, the only available disposal method is indescribably brutal. Using the Wii remote wand, you grab the Mii by its hair and - its little legs and arms waggling furiously in the air - dump it in a little grey "Delete" circle. I'm not sure which major religion's death rites this corresponds with, but it certainly ain't cremation, interment or burial at sea.

I want something more, and Nintendo has exposed a broader failing of the internet. Why, when the  sky's the limit, are the options so pedestrian?  I want the Mii world to rupture and wail when one of its members dies. Come on - the Prof Mii lives in an unreal realm, why should his passing not exploit its boundless potential?

I want the infinite potential of cyberspace to arrange the most elaborate and expensive funeral imaginable, incorporating tens of thousands of virtual mourners of all nationalities and a dozen elephants dragging a hearse made from the rarest metals on earth. I want a Mii version of the London Philharmonic to play the dirge as Prof Mii is given his send-off, and I want it conducted by a Mii George Gershwin. I want eulogies delivered by Mii versions of Socrates, Henry VIII and Winston Churchill. I want a Mii Groucho Marx and a Mii Will Hay to cheer everyone up at the wake. I want him to be conveyed to a Mii mausoleum twice the size of the Great Pyramids and I want a Mii Tutankhamen to welcome him in. 

Alternatively, I could just go back to playing Super Mario...   

Comments

[Hattie Duran]

Thicken the eyebrows and keep him for good. I see you've made him king. Good move.

[Kate Varah]

'Daddy mobile' does the same for me. We can ring Hong Kong with a press of a button so I can't understand why we can't call heaven?If Orange aren't prepared to put serious manpower on a solution to this, at least don't make me select from two equally dire options: delete or erase contact. Contact is all I want and delete is brutal. So it remains, never to be called, never to call, but always to remind me it and he was there but now isnt'. I vote hang onto the Wii Bear. There may be a time when it feels ok for him to whop you at pingpong once again. There may not, but here's to hoping.