Instigation

The topic of today's reading seems to be the line between virtual reality and real life. Or rather, in more specific terms, the line in which an online game can become a danger to its players and how much of the online world should affect the people that are involved in it. In previous classes we have discussed the issues of online attacks or abuse causing real life harm, but what is it when the harm is online as well. Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace is an article that raises this very question. Players were harmed virtually in the world, but what was the perpetrator's punishment to be? The players in the virtual world of LamdaMOO decided that the punishment should be in the world of the MOO, where the crime was committed. The problem with this is that there is no set form of punishment for the players who commit crimes such as these, and there is no way to keep them from coming back onto the game with a different login. Dibbell's other article shows us just this. The members of the group The Patrotic Nigras, after getting their Second Life personas banned or frozen, just kept creating new accounts in order to harass the players in the SL world. The questions that come to mind when reading these two articles are: What, if any, are the effective punishments for the crimes committed in online games? Is it even worth it to punish these players at all? Do you think they have a point in their mockery of the people of the Second Life and LamdaMOO communities? What are your thoughts on the fact that some of these “greifers” make a living solely based on their activities online? Is this a moral thing to do or to be, or is this taking advantage of people who just want to be left alone, and should be?