I keep reading comments about a sleeping bag and was wondering who else has read the Wikipedia article about the video game Rust? I don't think I can link anything here but what I read sent up red flags.
I was reading over the Wiki article and it mentions something about how at the "end of the game" players are offered a chance to start over and it's somehow connected to a sleeping bag. The term used is respawning and it's mentioned at the end of the "gameplay" section.
Miraculously a Nelson River boater came forward after the bodies were found and claimed credit for finding the bodies - he reported a sleeping bag in Port Nelson 111 km away from the bodies.
Their personal belonging were on the shore of the Nelson River 4km upstream of the boat, and we are to believe that a sleeping bag 111 downstream is related?
How many sleeping bag "sightings" have there been?
The reason I find this significant as well as mentioning Folie a Deux and the game Rust is the fact that Rust is a survivalist game. Does anyone know if they played this game?
MOO - but I could picture a conversation between BS and KM after yet another "sucky" thing happened in their real world lives. One of them says, "Why can't real life be more like Rust?"
As I said their plan sounds exactly like it was devised by someone who wishes video games were real and wants to start a militia in the woods. I agree that these games teach values that are maladaptive in the real world to say the least.
So, it appears the
sleeping bag could just be a practical camping item. But it could also be symbolic.
From what I have been reading about the game Rust, when you are killed (including if you choose the "kill" command on yourself) you start over in your next life - naked and with nothing but a rock. If you have a sleeping bag available (because you or a friend spent resources to create and place one in the game world) you can return to the game world on top of the sleeping bag. (Without a sleeping bag, you will reenter in a random location).
The sleeping bag concept can be used strategically. You can use them to get to the location in the game world where your friends are or near your camp where you may have left items. It can also be used as a kind of teleport to travel across the game world - kill yourself and respawn in a different location.
Suppose BS and KM could hear the helicopters and the approaching searchers. In the game, they need to either get away or have a confrontation. They would have probably realized they weren't likely to be successful in this confrontation (unlike the ones in BC) so they needed to get away.
They could not go back to the road without being discovered. They would not have wanted to head upstream on the river as Gillam and searchers were back there. When they looked downstream, they would have seen the rapids and no route past them. They would have felt stuck in the brush near where they were found. If they were playing the game, they could have placed a sleeping bag in the jon boat and sent it downstream. After they execute the "kill" command on themselves, they could respawn into the next life on the sleeping bag on the other side of the rapids and thus they would have escaped. It's a way of keeping control over the next move.
There is just something to this story that feels like they were following some kind of video game script. Even if they were actually aware on some level that it was real, they could have been going through the ritual of the game on another level in the interactions between themselves.
This is all speculation on my part. So MOO and all that jazz. And, of course, we may never really know.
