A woman in Japan has been arrested for the murder of her husband after their sudden divorce. That headline is simple enough, one that anyone in the world has heard before numerous times. Except, it wasn’t ‘really’ her husband. And he isn’t ‘really’ dead. Yet she really does sit in jail.
No, this is not Days of Our Lives – This is Alternate Reality. Everyone understands the concepts of online worlds where people share and interact. It could be gaming oriented like World of WarCraft where four and five generations of Ann DeMarle’s family play and talk to one another in real time every Thursday night. Or it could be Second Life, where hospitals and governments are retooling their planning and experimenting with how life works in rhythm or how it might work.
In Japan they have Maple Story, a similar type of online world where people live their lives everyday just like we all do, except they get to live it in any way they wish so long as it is within the established reality of the world’s parameters.
Many video games (15%) have violence and killing in them, but there is a difference between killing and murder, isn’t there? In this particular case we see true murder. This was not killing as part of a game or a storyline or pointless brutal violence, but instead murder built into an otherwise peaceful online world.
Of course this was not the life of a real person, but the time and energy participants put into their virtual persona is deeply personal to them. More so than your car, more so than your home. The time and thought participants put into crafting their virtual lives far outweighs what most of us spend on… anything. Even work. I personally find this type of activity to be wasteful and I do not participate in these types of worlds, but I’m not going to make value judgments on what others enjoy.
But the question is: Is this the first step toward a Bill of Virtual Rights? But not one with impact on the virtual world, rather one with implications on our physical world. Will rights be granted to crafted online profiles that restrict how we in the real world treat them? Will how we live, vote and eat be changed by the way we live in the virtual?
But just as #3 of the Ten Commandments on the Maple Story website clearly states:
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