We met on a game called
Skyrates, over a decade ago now. I found it because of a small site called
jayisgames, which reviewed the game on January 19, 2008; it's the only game from that site that I still remember, and I was probably on that site for three or four years.
Kincaid was a bear. Well, in real life, he was a dude who lived in Alaska, who had two adorable french bulldogs. In Skyrates, he was a member of the
Azure League, a group of free thinkers and scientists who treasured individual freedom above all else, and a bear. He took over tending bar sometimes in the in-game roleplay channel when I wasn't around, or was, uh, otherwise occupied. (He'd say something like 'lurve ferret' right about now, which is the only in-joke I'm going to make.)
We played Skyrates a lot together. We played the game, we min-maxed the game, we figured out the metagame, and, of course, we roleplayed the heck out of the metagame. Kincaid was a leading member of the League, and played a strong part in its politics, though, frankly, he personally probably didn't care for the politics as much as he was dragged in it, along with Mairi, Mammoth, and all them other Leaguers.
He was also always there with a kind word, a hug, and a presence in a way that very few others were, and probably contributed more to the RP scene than anyone else did; he was the rock that it was built on.
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Eventually - on the downswing of Skyrates, probably three years later - Kincaid and I started playing other games together, mostly WoW. And, jesus, we played WoW together for some eight or so years. Whenever an expansion - every expansion - would come out, he - who had like eight characters, and went from a raider to the guild leader - would save a character and we would level it together and raid and experience new content for a few months, before, inevitably, I'd lose interest in WoW and we'd play something else. Far Cry, Warframe, Destiny... we played a lot of the co-op games that came out between 2010 and 2017. He was my go-to choice for someone to ride shotgun on a new game, and I was his.
We started buying each other games in 2009, and kept it up for... well, for all of these years:
years of gifts
Across so many years and so many games, I don't remember specific moments, just that he was an indivisible part of my gaming life for the past decade.
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On December 14th, his brother posted this message in one of my Discord servers:
Hi. I am Kincaid's older brother. I don't know how well you know Frank. Frank passed away on December 10th. If anyone is a close friend of Franks please feel free to call me at [...]. I apologize for letting people know this way but I cannot find an address book or contact list. I want to let people know.
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And just like that, he was gone. He was 34, lived in Juneau, and we had known each other for a decade, without ever meeting.
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I've always been a cheerleader for the internet. Not quite as much as
John Perry Barlow, perhaps, but I have, from my earliest ventures to myspace and xanga and bbses, believed in the ability of the internet to bring people together.
It is not without its dangers, certainly. And it will never be without those dangers. But the capacity for the internet to connect those who otherwise would not ever have met each other, to create relationships across distances (and cultures and languages) is something extraordinary.
I - and many others, who gamed with him and saw only brief glimpses of his 'real' life - would've never met Kincaid without it.
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Fly Fright, friend.