Many gamers operate in two distinct worlds: real and online. When we die, it's easy to let our acquaintances in the former know about what happened to us, but updating our friends on services like Xbox Live or in MMOs is a bit more difficult for our surviving loved ones to do; something recently demonstrated by Melissa Allen Spangenberg, who spent a great deal of time trying to let her father's guildmates know about his sudden death. As a result, services are starting to pop up that give gamers the ability to notify their online contacts of their demise.

According to the Associated Press, sites like Slightly Morbid, Legacy Locker, and Death Switch have sprung up so that people have a way of providing others with a notice of their death, as well as keeping track of important things like passcodes, important documents, and lists of who needs to be contacted to so one can put the deceased's affairs in order.

While these sites rely on subscriptions, none of them were really created to generate a profit. Instead, the ideas for the services were created when their various founders lost someone close (or thought they did) and wanted to spare others the difficulty of letting online contacts know what had happened. Death Switch relies on people to log in periodically, otherwise an automatic email goes out to a pre-established list of contacts; Slightly Morbid, in turn, also sends out an email but doesn't require users to constantly log in. Instead, the account holder gives their login information to a trusted individual who can log into the account and then trigger the email notifications. Legacy Locker, which is set to launch next month, actually requires a copy of a person's death certificate before it releases the information stored on its servers.

While it certainly sounds a bit morbid to plan for this kind of thing, sites like the ones mentioned above seem like a solid idea for someone who happens to have a strong online identity. As people's online activity and gaming habits increase, it seems like these sorts of sites will not only provide a sound investment, but more of them will probably appear.