It has been widely reported that a Japanese woman faces a possible jail term after having "murdered" her virtual "husband" in the online world of Maple Story. After her own online persona had been "divorced" by his, the "real her" wrought revenge on the "real him" by hacking into his Maple Story account and deleting all traces of the "imaginary him". No blood was spilt, either virtual or real, but in doing the deed the woman had illegally accessed data that didn't belong to her. Hence her arrest. And today another story has surfaced of real-world crime resulting from other-worldly events.
Those of us who don't immerse ourselves in virtual worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online will always find it difficult to appreciate how disproportionately important those virtual worlds can be for the people who use them. A couple of years back, some waggish online gamers set up a virtual bank in Eve Online, before absconding with 790bn ISK (the online currency) and leaving players utterly distraught – despite the fact that no hard currency had disappeared.
But because virtual cash and virtual items can have a high emotional value, they end up having a real world value, too. Which might explain why a Dutch court has just sentenced two youths to community service for stealing imaginary items from another boy within the game Runescape.
The victim of the theft had actually been physically assaulted in his real-world bedroom, threatened with a knife and ordered to hand over, believe it or not, an imaginary amulet and mask. Now, these two could have conceivably been prosecuted for assault, or indeed wielding a knife, but the court case actually centred around the amulet and the mask. "Goods don't have to be material for the law to consider them stolen," pronounced the judge. One can only hope that the not-particularly short, not-particularly sharp shock of community service will still cause the offenders to ponder whether crime pays. Particularly as they nicked an amulet made up entirely of pixels on a computer screen.
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