A couple days ago Law & Order: SVU aired an episode called "Avatar." In this one Second Life or something a lot like it--it's called AU, Alternate Universe--is the tool used in a rape-murder. Although the interface looks like a strange cross between SL and Facebook (watch out all you Internet social networks, you're next) and is clearly not SL to anyone who knows SL or Linden Labs, the episode was disturbing in the way it implicates a virtual world as a breeding ground for criminal behaviors.
The difficulty with this episode is not the storyline itself: a young woman is kidnapped from her home by a lunatic who stalked her in the virtual world first and chose her there to be his RL victim. Nor is it the obvious distaste the police have for the idea of virtual worlds, since they gain a grudging respect for the Lab that runs the AU world and which is instrumental in the crime solving. The difficulty is the way this virtual world is portrayed and how all the residents there are seemingly sex-starved pedophiles.
We start with an unprosecutable rape perpetrated on the sister of a kidnapping victim by the boyfriend of the victim (as if even people who hang out with people who hang out in virtual worlds must be sexual predators). Then we discover that the kidnapped victim has created an underage stripper/escort avatar who runs a virtual club of underage avatars for pedophile avatars to ogle and abuse (never mind that the company who manages this virtual world has confirmed no one under 18 can play in their virtual reality). Then through a series of false names and credit card fraud we find a whole string of unsavory characters who hang in the virual world primarily to exploit sweet young things sexually, but also to bilk each other financially. Ultimately we discover that the real kidnapper/rapist is in the virtual world to reenact his prior (for which he has done time) unresolved crime of pedophilia and that the avatar of his latest victim looks just like his earlier RL child victim. Are you confused yet? I was.
The thing that bothered me was not that this plot had more twists than a bag of pretzels, but that the farther we go into it the worse the residents of the virtual world looked and a lot of that did nothing really to further the plot of the episode. Perhaps I woud be less upset if it were not for a flurry of concern from well-meaning family and friends who saw the show suggesting (along with a couple of "I told you so" remarks) it was time to give up my SL nonsense.
Dear Family and Friends, what gets forgotton here is that:
1) This was a TV show. Fiction! Sensationalist fiction at that, which bears little resemblance to SL which (hello!) bans anyone even pretending to engage in sex with a child or child porn.
3) You can be sure that I (like everyone else in SL) am over 21, have common sense, and have been (like you) capable of dealing with the threat of potential crime or ciminals in the "Read World" for years. SL is no different. In fact, the idea that numbers of criminals are likely to take time out to of their busy mafioso schedules to play at pretend crime and hunt me down seems a bit ludicrous now doesn't it?
2) Not everyone in SL is sex-crazed. Trust me on this. I have met men even I can't seduce. And the ones I do hang out regularly with in SL are educated, intelligent, classy men--I know this because class is not somethng you can . The guys who do come across as crude--the "Yo, bitch wanna fuck" types--are easily spotted and avoided. And anyway, asking for sex doesn't make you a criminal in the RL either, it usually just gets you slapped.
What is a problem is the hundreds of viewers who, not knowing thing one about SL, will immediately file it in their brains as "that game" that breeds perverts and pedophiles.
Of course the ones who think that are likely the same people who believe WWF is a real sport and that The Bachelor is real romance, too.
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