What if Grandpa leaves you his COD: Modern Warfare save file?  Will you play it-continue his legacy?

I hate to be morbid, but let's just get it out of the way: we're all going to die.

I can guarantee you that your death will never be able to be as awesome as a Death Gnome riding a pig.

Some of us will live to a ripe old age (although, from what I hear, it's more like "overripe" if you suffer from incontinence), but many of us will drop dead of a heart attack at 40 or 50, maybe even sooner, as freak accidents crop up a'la Alanis Morsette's song "Ironic".

Who knows, perhaps a freak surge on your PS3 will send you up to play in the great Beyond long before you ever get through the end of Bioshock Infinite (or, indeed, have a chance to play it in the first place).  At least we're largely past the days where you could accidentally (or purposefully) strangle yourself with a controller cord, but honestly, I'm worried about what some of these "motion control" games might accidentally cause us to do.  Imagine jumping around like a weirdo playing "golf" on your motion control only to have missed the fact that your scampy child has left his skateboard to the right and behind you, which is also right next to the stairs and OOPS, just as you jump back in excitement as you got that hole in one, you, much like the coyote in Looney Tunes, go belting down the stairs backwards and break your neck, sadly rendering your time in virtual pro-golf very short indeed.

"It's ok, Bob, that just needs a couple of stitches.  I'm sure that no one will even notice! Bob?  Bob?!"

The fact of the matter is that when we go off to whatever Thing or non-Thing that awaits us after the Big Sleep has set in, we're going to leave a lot of things behind-things including, but not limited to,

* Game consoles (including that old Atari that you just can't seem to get rid of)

* Games themselves (considering that most of us still get hard copies over paid downloads).

* Save files (it's hard to do away with that Game + after all that hard work, don't you think?)

So it makes sense that all this hard work is going to be left over even after we no longer exist.  Many years down the road, will your great-great-great-grandchildren open an old dusty box and pull out that game, containing that little spark of memory that you made?

To some extent, it's like a piece of you will always exist....don't you think?

I hate to be morbid, but, well, as I watch my daughter grow and master the very things that only a few decades ago I was learning to master myself, it does make me wonder exactly how much of "me" is being downloaded into the Internet (in this blog, for example) or on Facebook, or even in an old dusty email account that I have long forgotten about.  In this day and age, the trail of "I WAS HERE" is larger and more complicated than ever, and as you play your favorite games today, can you imaging how only a few decades from now, your grandchildren or even great grandchildren will remark about the simplistic level of gaming that your "retro" titles employ.

Whoever said that change is the only constant was very very right.

I suppose I shall never really fully get accustomed to living in linear time.

What are your thoughts about gaming and the thereafter?  Will you be buried with your copy of Ocarina of Time or will it be passed on as a family heirloom for generations to come?