CRIMINALITY IN VIRTUAL REALITY
My very first experience of a virtual world, came about during my high school days when my cousin tugged me to a video arcade. The bizarre ecosystem of shimmering game cabinets, flickering lights and phantasmagoric sounds of the arcade simply blew my mind away.
For 50 paise at a time , I yanked on the joysticks and jabbed at the plastic buttons as fast as I could, and found myself become all the things I dreamed about: a dragon slayer slaughtering dragons; a wizard battling ghosts and thieves; a Tarzan, garrotting marauders of the jungle; and a redeemer mowing down demons with machine guns . Video games became my ecstasy, and my time there, a kind of rapture. I was transported. I could become someone else, still remain myself. I could kill, but go unpunished. I could die but still, live.
Inhabiting a virtual world is an insanely addictive and immersive experience. Video games have been around since the 1970s but the online virtual games called ‘Massively multiplayer online role-playing games’ (MMORPGs) as they exist today were probably inspired by Neal Stephenson in 1992 in his epoch-making Virtual Reality (VR) cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” which fabricated the concept of “The Metaverse” a virtual society which people “goggled” into by donning a pair of VR goggles .
The Metaverse was a world in itself with virtual property stores, apartments, Laundromats, restaurants – basically mirroring almost everything that exists in real life. It also had a currency with which one could buy goods, weapons, eat-out, etc. One could be a truck driver in real life and still be a sword-slinging hero in the Metaverse.
The book also introduced the concept of the avatar, the graphical representation of a person in a virtual world. Today, as people spend thousands of hours rampantly tangled in the personas of their avatars, the line between man and machine, online and offline, is becoming progressively fuzzy and blurry.
It’s a little difficult to comprehend the psychology and mindset of the online gamers who inhabit the virtual worlds. Many have come to believe that their virtual world to be the real world and vice versa. To some, their avatars have become so real that anything that happens to their avatar in the virtual universe makes a deep dent on their actual persona.
As many as 20 percents of MMORPG players today believe that the virtual world is primary and the real world is secondary. To them, the earth is nothing more than “meatspace’ where the meat of their physical bodies reside, eat and sleep while online world is the actual existential world where business, social-bonding, interpersonal relations and sexual fulfilment happens. Although the majority of the gamers don’t feel this way, these feelings are becoming hackneyed as people increasingly continue to immerse themselves in pleasurable virtual environments.
This technophoria has a downside as was made axiomatic by a South Korean couple who devoted so much time caring for their virtual daughter in a virtual world called ‘Prius’ in a cyber cafe that they forgot to return home to feed their actual three-month-old daughter resulting in the death of their daughter.
In another instance, Shawn Woolley, 21, was so completely addicted to Everquest that when his avatar was killed ” he couldn’t get up and walk away from the game. The loss of an avatar was so unbearable that he shot himself at his computer. Similarly, a 28-year old man at an internet café in South Korea started to play a game called Starcraft. After 50 straight hours of gameplay, with only minor breaks for sleep or toilet use, the man collapsed and died from exhaustion.
In the virtual universe, we get to witness all types of crimes that are committed in the physical world. Gamers can be subjected to everything from cyberbullying to identity theft, with police in Japan arresting a man for virtually committing mugging sprees” with software “bots” in the online game Lineage II. Several cases of sexual assault” have also been reported in virtual worlds.
The world’s first virtual rape occurred in a world called LambdaMOO, in which a character called Mr Bungle used a “voodoo doll” program to take control of the two avatars of other users’ and then forced them to engage in sexual acts. In October 2016, a journalist by name Ms Belamire reported that she had been sexually assaulted while playing the VR game QuiVR, using the HTC Vive. During the game, a gamer with the onscreen name of ‘BigBro442’ first started to rub her breasts and later followed it up by rubbing her virtual crotch. Several other female users of VR have reported similar experiences.
In Japan, a 43-year-old woman grew so enraged after her online husband “divorced” her in the interactive Maple Story game, that she committed a virtual murder by eliminating him. The woman, Mayumi Tomari, was later arrested by the Japanese police for stealing the man’s login and password to destroy his avatar.
In the game ‘The Sims Online’ a 17-year-old boy going by the in-game name “Evangeline”, was discovered to have built a cyber-brothel, where customers would pay sim-money for minutes of cybersex.
There have also been other instances where online game interactions have actually sparked real-world crimes. For example, Kimberly Jernigan of North Carolina was arrested on charges of trying to kidnap a boyfriend she’d met on Second Life after he’d ended their real-world romance and sexual affair.
Then, there was the killing in Russia of a 33-year-old member of the Platinum clan of an MMORPG guild by a 22-year-old member of the rivalrous Coo-clocks clan. When the two virtual gang members confronted each other in the physical city of Ufa, Russia, the 33-year-old got badly beaten. He died on the way to the hospital.
In South Korea, where the number of computer game players is massive, some have reported the emergence of gangs and mafia, where powerful players steal and demand that the beginners give them virtual money for their “protection” similar to the system of mammools in existence in India.
Criminal activity involving virtual property and virtual currency became a foregone conclusion as soon as the property and currency became sufficiently valuable in the real world. Chinese gamer Qiu Chengwei lent a virtual sword to another gamer, Zhu Cauyuan. When Mr Zhu sold the other man’s sword, an incensed Mr Qiu stabbed and killed him.
A Japanese man hacked into another person’s virtual world account, sold her virtual house, and pocketed the proceeds. In South Korea, a 22-year-old student named Choi and an accomplice manipulated a virtual world server and made off with 1.5 billion won, or approximately US$1.2million.
MMORPGs have given rise to an entire economy of gaming artefacts. A contraption such as a gun acquired by a character can be sold to another character. Writer Julian Dibbell demonstrated that one could actually make a living trading virtual goods when he earned a profit of $3917 in one month simply by buying and selling virtual artefacts.
Virtual worlds have their own currencies, such as Linden dollars or World of Warcraft gold, which like Bitcoin can be converted into “real currency. In 2003, eBay alone saw over $9 million worth of transactions of virtual gaming artefacts. Economist Edward Castronova has estimated that, based on the wealth created by all players inside the game, Everquest Gross National Product (GNP) was $2216 per capita, making it equivalent to the 77th richest country in the world.
VR may be increasingly used not only by criminals but by terrorists and anti-social as well. Concerns about terrorist organizations using gaming Platforms for fundraising and recruitment are not unfounded. Hezbollah has developed its own shooter computer game named as Special Force 2, which acts as a radicalisation medium for young jihadis. In the game, players earn points by launching Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns and by becoming “suicide martyrs.
A report by the U.S. director of national intelligence indicates that terrorists appear to be using virtual spaces for undercover communications, to spread propaganda, train members, launder virtual currency, and even recruit new followers. A document leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that both the National Security Agency USA, and the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been spying on gamers by creating undercover avatars to snoop, recruit informers and perform mass interception between players in various games such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc hosted by Microsoft’s Xbox platform.
Finally, the fact that most of humanity is likely to spend much of their time in an immersive virtual world in future, has been beautifully depicted in Steven Spielberg’s visually stunning film “Ready Player One” a 2018 American sci-fi adventure film set in dystopian 2045.
From a spiritual perspective, in some ways, video games are actually more real than this physical world in which we live. Virtual reality is like spiritual reality. It’s not like physical reality. As the classic rock group, ‘The Police’ sang in their song of the same title, “We are spirits in the material world.” Although we live in a physical world, we experience the world with our minds and spirits.
Virtual reality bypasses the physical world entirely, as it belongs to the spiritual realms of pure thought and consciousness. When we die in a video game, it’s not game over, we can start a new game and play and die in as many games as you want, just like spiritual rebirths. But if you die in physical reality, you’re dead. You don’t get any do-overs.
Source from: epaper/deccanchronicle/chennai/dt:19.11.2018
Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, DVAC.
