Oh, I admit it. I’ve got an avatar at Second Life, and I still do log in occasionally, though less than I used to. My husband teases me – calls it Barbie for grownups – and there’s something to that. You get to create a character and make it look and dress the way you want. You get to navigate around a fantastically detailed virtual world. I’ve had drinks in an Irish pub, taken online classes, and shopped for designer clothes – something I’d never do in real life. And I love, love, love the Star Trek role-playing areas at Second Life. Yes, I really am that nerdy. But this… this is just mind blowing.
A Korean couple was so involved in Second Life they’d go to internet cafes for twelve hours a day, raising their virtual reality daughter online… while their actual reality 3 month old baby daughter starved to death at home. I can imagine one person being so deranged as to immerse themselves into virtual reality at the expense of real life. But two people? And no people in their real life who could intervene?
This has been going on for years, principally with Asian MMO players: everything from murder to dying due to over-playing (I can’t even imagine how that’s possible and I’m something of a ‘hardcore’ gamer) and it was only a matter of time before a child was killed over it and, in all likelihood, it won’t be the last.
(What’s really creepy is there’s this scene in Trainspotting (which was, allegedly, based loosely on true events) where the same thing happens, albeit the junkies in that case were on smack, whereas these junkies were on something…well…apparently just as bad.)
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