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- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The camera
He yelled at my cousin when the four of us were in the internet café. My brother and I were startled by how he reacted to his son. For a moment, I was afraid that he would shove my twelve year-old cousin who was literally half his height and probably a third his weight. I have always respected him as an elder but at the moment all I could think of saying was- chill… isn’t this just a game? It was just a game, at least for me. I have played PC Games since I was ten, so I guess it’s been more than a decade. I’ve yelled at people too but it has always been for fun, as a joke, and more to make the day interesting. Never was it serious.
Apparently what had happened was that my cousin lent an extremely rare sword to an on-line friend, another avatar he never met in person. The friend said he would return it after he completed the quest. He also promised to return it in a day or two. But he didn’t go on-line for a couple of days. My cousin left him messages but he never heard back again. That was when my cousin realized what had happened. Perhaps my cousin was too naïve to have trusted someone he just met two weeks ago. Perhaps it was too innocent to have lent away something that belonged to his dad. But isn’t this just a game?
It didn’t surprise me when I read an article dated last November in Fortune Magazine detailing the first death sentence caused by online gaming. This is what happened:
“Last year a 40-year-old man used a real knife to stab to death a younger man who had borrowed his virtual sword from an online videogame and sold it for $870.” (Source 1)
Since there are no laws in China governing virtual property, he could not turn to the police for help with the stolen item. So instead he, Qiu Chengwei, followed Zhu Caoyuan to his apartment in Shanghai and killed him in front of his girlfriend. When I interviewed Henry Lowood this past Thursday, he told me a similar story. By the way, Henry is a Curator for Germanic Collections and for History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries (click here for his website). He told me that in Korea, there was a guy who bragged about conquering a castle in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG out there breaking 6 million users in February of this year. Apparently, the castle he conquered belonged to a Korean mafia who later found out he was bragging about the conquest. Needless to say, he was taught a lesson to never brag again.
In the same article, there were several other incidents- a 13-year-old boy jumped from a 24th floor claiming that he would join his three virtual friends and another man protests a game by setting himself on fire. All of these incidents cause a stigma associated by the press with online gaming, becoming unpopular with parents and the government, just makes the situation worse.
I did an online survey and one of the questions I asked was if you ever committed a cyber crime. Of the respondents who have play MMORPGs, almost 10% have committed a cyber crime. This figure is significant. Just to give you a frame of reference, the highest theft crime rate of NYC from 1960 to 2000 is a little more than 3% (Source 2). Given that, 10% is astounding. Not to mention that the survey consists of well educated Stanford students only. Perhaps because there are no laws governing virtual property or perhaps it is easier to steal in a virtual world, but either way it means that this happens a lot.
My cousin lost a priceless sword and his dad only yelled at him. I know things could be worse. But somehow, perhaps because I was there or perhaps because they were close to me, I just didn’t want to see anything happen. That was when I noticed something was well, abnormal. Why did he care so much about the sword? Or rather, why did he care so much about the game? Hopefully, by the end of these journal entries, I can find some way to alleviate the situation.
