When I was a little girl, my mother worked at M-Net. On the day that school broke up, I was allowed to go with her to the office for the afternoon, along with all the other children whose holidays began that day.
I ganged up with a little horde of rabble-rousers and we gallivanted along the passages of the M-Net building searching for "famous people". We were rewarded with sightings of a couple of presenters preparing for their continuity slots.
After extracting a couple of autographs on letterheads from these hapless celebrities, we found ourselves at a loss as to what to do next.
"Let`s find the people from Loving!" cried one of my companions.
I looked at her askance. It was unfathomable to me that, even at such a young age, this person was incapable of grasping the realities of the location of television productions.
I relate this anecdote to illustrate the point that some people have a better grasp on reality than others. I consider myself to be among the former group, and this is why I was befuddled to learn that this past week, one online gamer killed another for selling his virtual sword.
Is it a game, or is it real?
The story of the sword is quite an interesting one, because it raises issues of ownership in cyberspace.
Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm
This smacks of the story (apocryphal or not) of the Dungeons and Dragons player who committed suicide when his character died in the game. I always felt that while the death of the character provided the catalyst, there must have been something pretty wrong with the player in the first place to have been so affected by the whole thing.
Regardless, the story of the sword is quite an interesting one, because it raises issues of ownership in cyberspace. What happened was that one player in an online game world owned, in that world, a particularly impressive sword. He lent it to a real-world friend of his in the game. This friend then sold the sword to another player for a whole whack of real-world cash.
The original owner of the sword tried to report the theft of his possession to the police, who explained to him that there is no law in China governing property in cyberspace, and that no case could be opened.
He then confronted his friend, and insisted he pay him the money that he had earned from the sale. The friend agreed to do so, but then delayed the proceedings. In frustration, the sword`s rightful owner shot his friend.
Reality is blurring
Everyone`s talking about the blurring of cyberspace and reality (in much the same way as the furor about the Dungeons and Dragons player), but as far as I`m concerned this doesn`t really constitute an issue of this nature.
Whether or not the sword was real or existed in cyberspace, the cash was very, very real. The friend who got himself quite a lot of money at the sword owner`s expense had definitely betrayed a trust. I don`t think the murderer was confused. I think he knew that he was killing his friend, but the reason he killed him was because the friend owed him a vast amount of money.
Not that murder is ever a viable solution, but I think that the people who really need their heads read are those willing to pay exorbitant amounts of cash for online possessions.
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