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Is Virtual Rape a Crime?
cyberianpan writes "Wired is carrying commentary on the story that Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen's allegations of rape in Second Life. For reasons of civil liberty & clarity we'd like to confine criminal law to physical offenses rather than thought crimes but already threats, menace & conspiracy count as crimes. Could we see a situation where our laws extend?"
Heck, this appears to be talking about SecondLife, you don't even have to log off. All you have to do (assuming it's your own land) is simply ban the guy from your land. It's like 2 clicks, it certainly would be faster than spewing out 2000 words of blog post about it. People online are dicks, don't let them get to you. That is the rule of the internet.
I read the internet for the articles.
Rape in online games is almost impossible to pull off. You have to Get the person to stand still for it, not report you, and not log off.
Eh...in Second Life it's a little different. Users can create customized animations that can be very detailed and last a long time, and their environment is a working physics simulation. You can use that physics to harass others -- knocking people into orbit is a common form of griefing on SL. Or you can trick someone into accepting and running your animation -- all it takes is for them to click on an object you control once. If they do that, you gain the ability to make their avatar do anything you want, as if you installed a rootkit on their avatar. So 'standing still' isn't a problem. You can be tricked into cooperating.
As the article mentions, 'logging off' isn't always an answer, especially if you're doing business on SL. Logging off then means closing up shop, and that's a bad solution.
The good solutions are reporting it to Linden and getting a (hopefully) swift response, or using common sense and anti-griefer tools to protect yourself. I think this is all going to boil down to 'should we protect people with bad judgement online?' And I think the correct answer is, 'If they're adults, then No.'
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
You can write scripts that take control of other people's avatars. I didn't play for long before getting bored with SL, but usually this is used so people can click on objects and then their avatars interact with them. E.g., if you click on a chair you'll sit in the chair, if you click a bed you'll lie down, if you click a swing set you'll start swinging.
There are certain situations where your avatar can get "stuck" -- I got stuck between a hammock and a wall once and it took me about 5 minutes to extricate myself. Another time, I got stuck in a "dancing" script after clicking a button and then losing track of where it was, and couldn't stop dancing until I found the "off" button for the dance.
Usually, it's all fun, but scripts have a high potential for abuse if you make them hard to turn off.