Virtual footprints

I was checking on a web forum of a game that I used to play when I stumbled upon an old thread that got bumped up. It was an almost 2 years old thread.

A tribute to a deceased fellow gamer that everyone loved so dearly...

What was meant to be as a quick skimming and browsing session between work became something more then when the gamer's real name and education background rang a bell.

NTU engineering student, David.

It took only few milliseconds then to connect the dots between these two facts:
the infamous mysterious case of the death of an Indonesian student in Singapore and
this gamer of whom that thread was dedicated to.

I did read plenty of articles regarding the case back then. Of how there are plenty misinformation seem to happen, scenarios that didn't make any sense,...

I remembered how my impression of him was mostly what was painted by the media: he's a student in his last year, had a bit of problem with his study, a gamer, like to spend time in front of his PC...

But now, realizing he played the exact game I played, and reading his fellow gamers account of him in that thread... it seems so real now.

Everyone portrayed him as a cheerful, outgoing, helpful person. And I can see how that could indeed be the case in that game.
And reading through the long threads, where everyone described him very differently compared to all the media portrayal of him that I had read before,
painted an entirely different character of him in my head.

it's his virtual footprints...

no one in the thread seemed to have met him in real life.
But he touched their life just the same.

Everything happens online might be entirely unreal..
fake characters, fake stories,
but it's all real people behind all of those...
And when you did touch someone's heart.. it's not a virtual heart that you've left your impression on...

I wonder if I have left certain virtual footprints to my gaming fellow...

R.I.P for David Hartanto Widjaja