Thursday, October 23, 2008

Pwned

It's a sad story, but one that's been seen time and time again. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. There's a wedding, and, over time, boy and girl start falling out of love, so they get a divorce. Girl takes the concept of divorce badly, and makes the decision to exact vengeance on boy. Girl tracks boy down and commits murder. We wish that such a story would never happen, but it does pop up from time to time, and it just recently did again in Japan.

Except for the key detail that the two were married online, and she killed his avatar.

That's right, folks. She got so distraught over the concept of her online (read: totally fake) marriage falling apart that she decided to remove from the equation the thing that was causing her such pain. That thing, for those curious, was a collection of pixels on an MMORPG. And now, because of it, the woman is in jail, awaiting charges.

Naturally, this could be seen as yet another reason for people to avoid online gaming. Sure, you might be able to run around a lush, virtual world, casting yourself as the hero in a global conflict, but you might meet a crazy person that wants to get compu-hitched. Next thing you know, you're sharing LAN cables, have a separate teamspeak set up for the person in question, and spend all of your time trying to craft them a perfect piece of jewelry. Then they decide that they want to leave you for that awesome character with all of the awesome equipment, and you never see them again. Obviously the only recourse is to log into their account and have their avatar commit suicide, preferably in a grotesque fashion.

Or, you know, you could meet people in the real world. Just think of it as the most realistic MMO ever.

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