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I hate to disagree with my learned colleague, Bruno Waterfield, but the arrests for theft in Habbo Hotel are not the first for virtual crime at all.
Meet the new world: same as the old world The Dutch police are latecomers to the scene, having missed the Japanese arrests in 2005 for crimes in Lineage II.
Agang of teenagers made automated characters (known as ‘bots’) to livein the game, attack real characters and steal their money. In 2005Lineage II artifacts were tradeable on eBay, so this was real violence,real theft, real crime, just perpetrated through a computer.
The South Korean Police have a special unit for virtual crime, the Cyber Crime Investigation Team. In 2003 they had 40,000 complaints, 22,000 of which were related to games.
A suit was filed in New York at the end of last monthover unauthorised copying of commercially-available items in SecondLife and virtual artifact trading company IGE have attempted to suegame manufacturers after they were blocked for using sweatshops inMexico.
This is without going into the case of Zhu Caoyuan,murdered over the theft of a sword that only existed in the game Legendof Mir 3.
The common factor in all these crimes is not that theytook place online. Zhu Caoyuan was entirely real. The common factor ismoney.
The sword had been sold for the equivalent of £480. Thestolen Habbo furniture was worth nearly £3,000. The Lineage II objectsstolen by the Japanese gang’s bots were worth between £10 and £40 each.The Second Life objects were the basis of a growing business.
Realmoney takes a virtual world closer to the real world than it ever couldbe otherwise. The objects in it matter more and earning money, nomatter how small the amounts might be, makes virtual work real, ratherthan being a game that looks a bit like work from the outside.
Like sex, money gets into everything. And once it’s there jealousy, crime and violence won’t be far off.
Isay that like it’s a bad thing, but in fact it’s just life. That it’sbeing played out by people pretending to be orcs or giant fluffyman-tigers makes no difference at all.
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