Sometimes I wake up in the morning, unsure about why I’m here. What is our purpose in life? Why do we wake up every morning? How did I get here? Yes, where is that large automobile?
Then I’m handed stuff like this, and I realize: wait a minute, there is a mission for me in life, and it is to show my disturbing lack of empathy to the world. Thanks!
(Note: link is supposed to be NWS. I’m not sure why, but there you have it. I think she talks about porn somewhere.)
This article’s Time To Dibbell: 2.47K. Pretty good, Kelly!
Rape is a crime of power, humiliation, and emotional violence. Any non-consensual kind of event like what happened to Anshe could very well cause the same sort of effect on the victim and I’m apalled that journalists would report on the incident with such obvious lack of compassion or comprehension.
Yes. Someone outside the Graef household is actually, seriously arguing that Anshe Chung was raped by flying virtual phalluses.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Ms. Chung was griefed. Something we are all familiar with in the MMO world (Psychochild covered this angle very adeptly already, so I’ll just direct you there) and despite Prokofy Neva’s profuse, multimegabyte rantings against “tekkies” to the contrary, Second Life is in fact an MMO game. Albeit one where the Time To Cock is measured in picoseconds. In fact, I fully expect an open source SL client to have a phallus ON THE LOGIN SCREEN.
So, at its core, this is a Customer Service issue, not a DMCA violation or a violation of free speech or abuse of political rights or whatever the hell else heavy breathing happens. This is the exact same problem that every MMO deals with, every day. The difference is that MMOs are designed to be griefer resistant, thanks in large part to hard-won experience that they need to be, whereas Second Life, by dint of not being a “game”, has given people tools to be more effective griefers.
But it’s certainly not rape by any definition. If it is, then flaming someone on a forum is assault and battery. Labelling it such not only laughably trivializes sexual assault, it makes discourse on how to stop griefplay in social virtual worlds – which is a problem – that much more caustic and unproductive.
The point Ms. Rued is making, when you toss aside the attacks on journalists who look askance at the Second Life community’s orgiastic debauchery, can be condensed into her closing:
Virtual worlds invite players to invest emotionally in their characters, and it only seems fair that journalists acknowledge that investment. The avatar is virtual, the player and her feelings are not.
Hurting someone’s feelings is not rape, it’s rudeness. Both are undesirable. But to confuse the issue by conflating the two makes it impossible to work towards solving either by closing off any discussion with a Godwin (or, in this case, a Dibbell).
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I’m really not interested in Second life in any aspect at all. I just don’t care about Second Life. I wonder how many of your other readers agree?
It’s been a few years since I dropped in on the Neo-Futurists here in Chicago,
http://www.neofuturists.org/shows/tmlmtbgb.htm
but one of their many two-minute plays addressed this very theme in what I thought was a perfect manner. It consisted of a series of actors regaling the audience with brief tales of personal insult, which the character said made them feel raped. The piece concluded with a short, horrific newspaper description of a young bride who was kidnapped, gangraped, murdered, and then dumped in the trunk of a car on the morning she was to be wed.
There is a lot of drama surrounding most everything that happens in Second Life, and I think that has tangled their perspective here. I agree, the important issue here is the ease of griefing in Second Life, which is something that will forever hold it out of the mainstream, if not better handled. I have to regard the protests being made in this case as at least partly being intended to distract attention from this significant failure on the part of Second Life.
I don’t disagree entirely with what you’re saying Scott, but I do think there are degrees of griefing, and at some point it becomes harrassment. (Also a CS issue.) But not rape. There is another element to rape that Kelly doesn’t talk about, and that is the victim’s inability to physically remove themselves from the situation, either through intimidation or restraint. When it becomes physically impossible (a la A Clockwork Orange) to exit the client, then maybe we can start talking about rape.
Come on. These were sparkly cocks floating across a stage. Fair enough, the Asian woman in a construction outfit with the 80-foot tall cock was a little much, but one person’s griefing is fifty other people’s funny.
At Christmas I showed the video of the dancing cocks to my mother (60 years old, by the way,) and she thought it was hilarious.
-Rip
I wholeheartedly agree with Scott here. And to riff on Riprend, floating penises at a press conference is not severe griefing. When I was a PK in days of yore I knew asshole PK types (unlike my completely benign dread lord self naturally) who camped peoples’ houses for DAYS and killed them every time they came near. The prick I’m thinking of made a blacksmith quit the game b/c his miner mule could never go to work.
I’ve seen RP villages slaughtered over and over and my god over again just b/c they could be. Until they weren’t anymore.
I’ll stop before I start waxing poetic about Abyss. But this is two PR events that got vandalized. I really fail to see how anyone who’s been online for more than a month can call that “severe” griefing.
But then again I’m the type of prick who ruined UO for everyone else so what do I know.
Sorry, Lum, I couldn’t hear your rational argument over the squalling of the Chinese babies they just killed to deliver my gold to me in an hour
So whenever my boss chews me out at work I have in fact been raped?
Sweet! I’m going to see HR right now, and I will be getting a lawyer on retainer.
By Rued’s definition, I get raped hundreds of times a day by spam emails.
I’m pretty sure if I were being raped hundreds of times a day my hoohaa would be sore, and it ain’t.
Did you just say “askance”? Are you kidding me?
No one else is confused by the nature of this issue. It’s ridiculous to even comment on it as anything but a typical (if amateurish) attempt for a businessperson to spin everything their way and make themselves look like a victim as a means of shamelessly abusing every means of retribution.
I honestly do not understand why you bothered to read that “article” instead of just sending her an e-card of a dildo that says “thinking of you”.
So if everything that hurts someone’s feelings is now “rape”, what do we term a crime that involves physical violence and forcible sexual intercourse? We’re going to need a new word for that, obviously, or otherwise a lot of emergency room staff are going to be running to get the rape kit when the “victim” has never even been on the same continent with, let alone shared bodily fluids with, the “rapist”. I must be getting old, because I remember the days when “injury” involved blood, not feeling unhappy.
As for the flying penises, too bad someone couldn’t create a virtual Lorena Bobbitt in time. That would have cut them off at the pass, as it were. Fight code with code.
And for what it’s worth, for nearly eight years I’ve been playing a MMORPG that is in some ways as much of a virtual world as SL — perhaps more so, in that we’re limited by the world around us, we can’t just re-code it at will. It’s only a few thousand people, so we all pretty much know each other by name or reputation. There have been RL marriages between people who met each other there, RL divorces between people who met someone ELSE there, police called to people’s houses, suicide attempts, births, deaths, all that drama. There have been times that the players were practically at war with the company that was (at the time) running it. I’m one of the prominent members of the community there, occasionally (including at present) an unpaid semi-employee of the company. It’s kept me up at night, it’s made me cry, it’s made me laugh, it’s kept me sane, and in many ways it IS my second life.
But we (mostly) all remember one thing: What happens in the game IS A GAME. If you don’t like what someone else is doing in the game, you can ignore them or report them or just log off. Someone laid out a giant phallus with yellow scrolls (cheapest stackable item in the game) where I “work” once. I didn’t yell “rape!” — I just cleaned it up. I can always use a few spare yellow scrolls. Was it meant to be sexual harassment? Probably. But it was just a drawing of a dick, by a dick, in a computer game. I’ve experienced real sexual harassment, with a real employer, in the real world. I know the difference between your boss telling you that you do what he wants if you want to keep your job, and some idiot teenager drawing the body part he thinks with. IT’S NOT REAL. For that matter, I’ve also been stalked IRL. I sleep with a knife to this day. Someone killing my avatar every time she walks into a PK area is *not* stalking, it’s *not* any kind of harm — it’s friggin’ annoying, yes, but I know the real thing, and that ain’t it.
That bawl-baby needs to woman up, get a clue, and get a life. Sister, if the worst you ever experience in life is a swarm of imaginary flying penises, consider yourself blessed.
“Sister, if the worst you ever experience in life is a swarm of imaginary flying penises, consider yourself blessed.”
I absolutely adore this phrase. It’s hilarious. Thank you for brightening my day.
Thank you, sir.
Oh, THERE are some fuckin’ odds.
“As for the flying penises, too bad someone couldn’t create a virtual Lorena Bobbitt in time. That would have cut them off at the pass, as it were.”
Maybe it is just early in the morning, but that image was very amusing.
Oh, and they been letting women on this Intarweb thingy a bit now, so I reckon the odds these days are pretty close to fifty-fifty. Welcome to the new century.
We need some willful stupidity laws. If you claim ownership of something no law allows you to own, you should be publicly stoned. If you label something a crime that is obviously no where close to the crime, you go to jail for life.
Okay, maybe we could revise the punishments.
And as far as reading about Second Life here… I don’t play any MMO right now, but I don’t come here to read about MMOs. I come for the freak show, and anything less than Second Life is holding back
“I’m really not interested in Second life in any aspect at all. I just don’t care about Second Life. I wonder how many of your other readers agree?”
The post is less about SL and more about the idiocy espoused by the post he linked to. It just so happens that SL is the current mainstream media hot topic for virtual worlds. So it tends to create these rather absurd stories,comments, posts whatever.
Besides since it’s his blog it doesn’t really matter what we want him to post
At AGC a few years ago.
I sat on a panel with the fine fellows at Linden Labs, with Daniel James of Puzzle Pirates as moderator – And some other ‘tiny’ MUDS – where we debated the virtues of User Created Content. I was the sole ‘big MMOG’ panelist, and often found the panel solidly 4 v 1 ganged up on me.
There were two main topics of debate – one being the problems with the user created content – copyright infringement, quality of content, ownership of content, adequate content creation tools.
And the second problem, which I took quite a beating on, was griefing and customer service.
Use this analogy – a big MMOG is a Vegas Casino – serving up tightly controlled entertainment for a fee. User created content MMO’s are Burning Man – where the participants are the entertainment, and money can be made.
We walked through this analogy repeatedly, particularly in regards to griefing. A casino starts by providing basic security and amenities, then upgrades continuously until you end up where we are today. 24 hour closed circuit security, a squad of goons on call, Oxygen pumped into the rooms, waitresses providing free drinks, comps for big spenders, and comps for people who have bad experiences, for one reason or another.
Whereas, at burning man, everyone lives and lets live, man! They have a police force equal to a major city. And the cops arrest people breaking the law, but the community self-polices. It’s the brave new world, dontcha see!
They argued, repeatedly, that the community would self-police.
And I concede that point to a degree – a *tiny* community of 100-150 members can, and will, self-police, with minimal tools.
You can never expect a larger community to self police. And providing basic policing only – will ultimately fail. You have to have a commitment to community care – for example, Camelot made changes in the game to prevent ‘grief healers’ from siphoning away experience points from others.
For the record, I believe in cyberrape. I’ve been an admin on MUDs where it occurred. I’ve seen female characters in games degraded so badly that the avatars abandoned their communities and never logged in again. It can happen, and it’s pretty horrible when it does.
Equating this event with that is a pretty big stretch. It was humiliating. It was griefing. But trying to give it the same psychological impact of an actual rape actually does more to belittle the latter.
“For the record, I believe in cyberrape. I’ve been an admin on MUDs where it occurred. I’ve seen female characters in games degraded so badly that the avatars abandoned their communities and never logged in again. It can happen, and it’s pretty horrible when it does.”
It’s still *not* rape. As a poster above pointed out, they can still always escape, in one way or another — logging off at worst case. Harassment is really a much more appropriate term here, honestly.
To be fair, the DMCA requests came from Linden Labs themselves. When the issue of griefing first came up, their first response was to tell their customers to take DMCA legal action rather than, you know, police their own world.
I do think a wiggly dildo would be an apropos login animation for the SL client. “LOADING:” *wigglewigglewiggle*
Of course Linden Lab will force people to manage their own IP issues. If they admitted to policing their world, then they’d have less abilit to claim innocence when it comes to their users breaking the law.
As far as the Anshe thing goes, calling it rape is moronic. I think any kind of “cyberrape” is best described as harassment — using terms like “rape” to describe non-physical harassment really marginalizes those who really have been raped, and encourages the pointless notion that VWs are real places. Goddamn exceptionalists.
The Kelly Rueds of the world would argue rather vociferously that players forming an emotional attachment with a game world is not only natural but necessary for the ultimate enjoyment of the experience, no matter how much damage people risk by treating any aspect of the Internet the same as they would reality.
Teh intarwub is not reality. It cannot be reality. Except with a wink and a smile, it has never pretended to be reality. It is something else.
Responsible veterans of the Internet should be warning people along those lines.
I’m with Damion — I’ve seen it too, and yeah, it’s not rape, but it can have pretty serious psychological consequences.
In fact, I think that before being entirely dismissive of Dibbell’s original article, it’s worth going back and re-reading it — there is a HUGE gap between what happened to Anshe and what happened to the folks involved in the LambdaMOO case.
Even in the LambdaMOO case though, the ‘victims’ did not have to just stay online and take it for hours on end. And were their avatars rendered helpless and incapable of moving or doing/saying anything in return?
Let’s face it, the reason the word “rape” even gets thrown out there is because it gets attention… far more than just calling it just what it really is. Online harassment.
…And as far as ‘psychological consequences’ go, well, there’s room for a lot of debate about that as well.
Regardless of the details, equating so-called “cyberrape” as described here is akin to equating pvp play to murder. It’s absurd. In both cases it is inconvenient at worst. If someone has invested themselves in their online character so deeply that these things really seem like rape and murder that does NOT make it so, it makes those people psychologically imbalanced and in need of assistance.
In these cases being discussed it IS the victims fault, because by continuing to stay logged in they are then a willing participant in the activities taking place in the shared space. If you don’t like it, log the hell off and do something else that doesn’t disturb you so much already. Or, at worst, complain about harrassment and get it stopped. But don’t cry about rape and murder because it ISN’T. Not even close.
Casinos pumping oxygen into casinos is an urban myth. Google it.
And may I add, “casino”. No editing FTW.
Errr…no. It is never the victim’s fault. This implies that the magnitude of the assault is at such a level that the victim feels they have no recourse other than to remove themselves from the virtual world. Excluding the hyper-sensitive, nobody should ever have to endure such treatment. Blaming the victim is puritanical thinking.
As I said in a previous comment, I don’t think it was rape. But it was harassment, and Linden should have treated it as such. It should come as no surprise that they didn’t.
In general I would agree, Amber, but the key part…
Excluding the hyper-sensitive
That’s exactly who all this is about, though. The people that experience something like this and feel that they’ve literaly been raped. It’s those people my comments are directed towards.
Anytime your online experience is making you feel literally raped, I don’t care what the situation is it is time to log off and reevaluate your choice to participate in those particular activities, because you’ve completely lost all perspective.
Spot on TPR.
I’m going back to something that got me flamed to hell and back on Lum’s but I still hold as true. A lot of psychologically broken and fragile (in particular, manic depressive) people play these games, and in much higher proportion than other entertainment forms. Nothing I’ve seen in the past five years has changed that opinion, except that the populist draw of WoW has decreased the proportion somewhat.
I can’t stress enough how big the separation between actual rape and this ‘cyberrape’ thing is. Rape means the victim cannot escape and is being physically restrained and forced to interact with an attacker’s physical genitalia.
Sexual assault means the person was in the beginning stages of a rape act, usually involving some form of physical duress to genitalia, and escaped.
Nothing in games can approach or even be worthy of being mentioned in context of either of these terms. Harassment is even questionable. In almost all games, there are options to /mute people. If you have not taken the time to familiarize yourself with this suite of tools, then, I consider it much like using a jackhammer without an instruction manual. The jackhammer manufacturer isn’t liable because you were a dumbass.
Second Life doesn’t offer this suite of tools, and in this instance, I frankly think it’s buyer beware. There’s a lot of documentation out there about what occurs in Second Life, and if you don’t research the product, then you have to accept the consequences of what happens to your avatar, your -imaginary- representation in an -imaginary- world. At least for the three seconds it takes to hit the red X in the right corner of the screen, at which point it all stops and you have the freedom to find a product more amenable to your tastes.
-Rip
Yes, nitwits. We all get that calling this “rape” is absurd. Find a talking point that isn’t in line with shooting fish in a barrel. Fucking hens.
And while i find pretty much everyone playing this game to be loathesome and deserving of humiliation, we’ve reached a point in just about everything where “caveat emptor” just doesn’t fly. Plus, it’s an even more idiotic base of thought that the options for everyone BUT the griefers to be limited to “take it or leave”. Those are clearly options for victims, yet people inexplicably fall back on them as reasons why the afflicted CAN’T FEEL LIKE VICTIMS.
Have we even established exactly WHY no one was able to do anything about this? Because if we were going to lame around with beating the rapehorse, i’d wonder why people up in arms about it aren’t trying to peg the Lindens as enablers or accessories. Guess that gets in the way of that whole DMCA thing? Oh well, no one was holding out hope that it had legitimate uses anyway.
Really, does anyone at Linden Labs do any actual work? Because the only things i’ve ever observed about this game is that A) I’ve never seen a SL player that wasn’t an overweight wannabe goth/RenFair reject (Literally. I’ve seen the footage of SL players), and B) No one actually works on the game besides the nimrods playing it.
I do think that the underlying argument that is being made by calling this rape is worth considering, namely that by reporting this event, it caused further embarrassment to the victim. The the invocation of the idea of rape to invoke the idea of protecting the victim from hostile public exposure is a logical, if not terribly sensible argument
And there is no question in my mind that people can get their real feelings hurt very badly in a virtual world. In fact, lacking the non-textual cues and social linkages that keep most of us decent in the real world, I think people have an increased capacity for casual cruelty online. I’ve seen this from the player’s vantage often enough.
But in this case, I don’t have much sympathy. The victims have made themselves representatives of SL, and made at least a virtual profit doing so. The attack in this case was, to my view, more on the image of SL than on the avatar or it’s owner. I see this as more of a cream-pie-to-the-face gesture against a public figure than a personal attack against a private individual, and thus, while not acceptable social behavior, certainly proper news.
Jumping on the favorite phrases bandwagon, I like this one
“Because if we were going to lame around with beating the rapehorse…”
It’s got a certain “WTF?!?!” Ring to it, especially out of context.
As to the emotional attachment issues… I see no difference between a virtual identity and a physical identity. People will argue that digital is not “real” it doesn’t matter since you can’t feel it. Digital is after all only made up of a collection of bits instead of a collection of atoms.
That doesn’t matter.
Some people, especially these people, present themselves online as they feel they are. They can form an emotional attachment to a character in the same way someone feels about their identity. If someone keeps on calling you by the wrong name, you probably get bothered. Why? It’s just a collection of sounds that you’ve identified with. Hell, it’s not even original to you, hundreds if not thousands of other people probably have the same first name as you. None the less people identify with their name and feel bad when it’s mauled. Beyond the point of just a name, when you are verbally harassed in person, people can break down. When someone calls you a “cock sucker” to your face, you get upset. You know you’re not a “cock sucker” everyone else knows you’re not a cock sucker, you probably don’t even like the guy who called you a cock sucker, none the less for some odd reason, you get upset. It’s different levels for different people. Some people will lay waste to his face immediately. Some will try to ignore it until the 50th time when they explode in a ball of rage or melt down into a puddle of unstable emotions. Others will burst into tears as soon as the first syllable is recognized. Why is it different then when the last person bursts into tears in person, as opposed to when the burst into tears infront of their computer monitor. Of course you can always shut down your machine online, but in person you can always walk away. There isn’t enough of a difference to merit demanding that person go into therapy because they’re too attached to their online persona. The virtual is a reality when it comes to emotions and feelings. It doesn’t matter if the derisions come through a compression of fluids you then perceive as sounds or through a projection of photons you see as text. It can hurt just as much either way.
All that said, I do believe people should grow a thicker skin. However it doesn’t matter if what’s said was online or in person. Our society coddles the unstable. You have to be careful of what you say and to whom in person, or all sorts of problems could come up. Online is the brave new world, but it’s still populated from the same people you know in reality. And when some emotionally unstable twat logs on, they expect the same level of society mandated emotional protection they get in the real world. If they don’t, they’ll whine about it, using the same over inflated sense of importance they would in the real world. Does that make it right? No, but it shouldn’t be unexpected. If a person breaks down over something done online, that does not make them a social maladjusted person. The internet is a means of interacting with others. Just because it’s a different media doesn’t make it any less valid. Most peoples emotions don’t take into account “Oh hey, this verbal barrage was transmitted over fiber optic cables, so I won’t feel hurt.”
You know, sometimes you go on a tangent you enjoy to much to realise it’s entirely irrelevant until it’s too late.
I think I ended up arguing with half a sentince in Riprends post. So feel free to ignore me, just the ramblings of an unstable man. Nothing to see here.
Have we even established exactly WHY no one was able to do anything about this?
Yes, I can answer that, at least for the SL flying peni event. Whoever owned the land on which the peni were flying had total control of the situation. If the land “belonged” to the owners of the flying peni, then they are in control and everyone else is tresspassing and can hardly complain about being harrassed on land that they shouldn’t be on. If the land “belonged” to Ashne Chung or the CNET folks (much more likely), then they have a suite of tools that allow them to very quickly and very easily take total control of the situation, allowing for actions as simple as ejecting the offending player and their peni from the land with a simple mouse click, to as extreme as the equivalent of a full lock-down, where all scripted objects are immediately halted and returned to their owners.
The point is, Linden Labs has provided ample and easy to use tools so that the land “owner” has nearly complete control over what does and does not occur on their virtual property. If CNET (the most likely owner of the land in the peni event) is unwilling to learn how these tools work, then they should not be opening up a presence in that virtual world.
This is why I have so little sympathy in this particular event. The victims were willfully ignorant of the full control that they had over the situation. Therefore, they are just as at fault for anything that happened as the peni thrower, and have NO right to claim victimhood.
The only exception to that would be if the event were held on public Linden land, on which no individual players have such controls. Then they either should have known to hold it on their own land where they have control or have a Linden present to control disruptions. In this case I would agree that there was harrassment going on that should be looked into by Linden. But certainly not rape. And even if this were the case it would be stupid to hold an event like that on public land in SL, especially if you have your own land to hold it on where you have control (and CNET does).
As far as the Anshe thing goes, calling it rape is moronic. I think any kind of “cyberrape” is best described as harassment — using terms like “rape” to describe non-physical harassment really marginalizes those who really have been raped, and encourages the pointless notion that VWs are real places.
Calling it rape is pretty moronic. But, considering how woman have been treated throughout history, simply calling it harassment isn’t right either. If they were burning virtual crosses in virtual black folk’s yards, would that simply be described as harassment?
It would be if instead of slavery, America had built itself on a foundation of “forcefully importing” women. As it is, they burn their OWN bras and Labia sounds like it could be a country anyway.
So, TPRJones established that there are methods of control. Anyone care to ask CNet what particular viral strain caused them to NOT expect this to happen? Everyone knows SL’s TTC rating and CNet, i’m hoping, is at least vaguely familiar with the internet, so what the fuck?
They forgot, in their haste and excitement, that people are broken toys.
> Both are undesirable.
Fuck you.
It’s nice of you to offer, but I believe Lum is happily married.
It wasn’t an offer, it was verbal rape.
I always try to think the best of people. It usually annoys the fuck out of them.
When I first saw your headline I thought you’re talking about most popular blog spam words
“The point is, Linden Labs has provided ample and easy to use tools so that the land “owner” has nearly complete control over what does and does not occur on their virtual property.”
First up, fuck no. I own land in SL and I have been griefed on it many times and have had objects, replicating boxes, scripted weapons and a ton of things I ‘don’t allow on my land’ still affect me on my land (and yeah I know how to use LL’s fabulous business-service grade land-management tools). ;p
You don’t have full control when your neighbor has a dev kit and is located a couple virtual inches from your virtual property. Multiverse and similar platforms will finally give people true control over a free player-driven MMO space but SL is not designed to allow much privacy or control when you are on your land. You have close to zero control when you are visiting any other location in the world. And for people who don’t understand why Anshe sat there during the attack you’ve probably never been pummeled with shit during a huge press con that you really wanted to continue with (or experienced the crippling lag in SL that accompanies object attacks like the flying cocks). Saying the victim can “flee” is kind of a moot point in real life when someone pelts you with a stream of projectiles. People don’t say “why didn’t you dodge it you stupid mofo?” and blame the victim for poor reflexes. ;p
As to the folks who keep saying I called Anshe’s flying dildo attack “rape” please read my post (not just the selective blog quotes here) and the reuters article I linked to where Anshe’s husband describes the incident as cyber rape porn. I used the victim’s terminology. If she feels raped, who the hell are you to argue?
Logically, you have to consider how offline behaviors map to virtual worlds. Theft is not the same, harassment is not the same, and sexual assault is not the same. Human behaviors adapt to new environments but people’s underlying motives are the same. If someone seeks to use sexual words or imagery as a means to humiliate, harm, or dominate someone, how can you say actions of that type have no *possible* relationship to sexual violence in the real world? It doesn’t trivialize literal physical rape at all to discuss ethical parallels in virtual worlds where *the physical does not come into play* and violence takes on entirely psychological forms.
Harassment is no more accurate than “rape” because this was (presumably) not an ongoing problem but an isolated “attack.” Griefing doesn’t do it justice because of the sexual nature of the attack any more than physical assault does justice to offline assaults of a sexual nature. We lack the vocabulary to discuss these issues but apparently everyone has the verbal aptitude to call me moronic for trying to discuss the subject with imperfect terminology for attacks like this. Griefing is a moronic term that’s overused as a catch-all for any sort of undesirable online behavior. Good thing offline social codes and criminal laws differentiate between undesirable actions with a finer granularity. :p
“The Kelly Rueds of the world would argue rather vociferously that players forming an emotional attachment with a game world is not only natural but necessary for the ultimate enjoyment of the experience”
Hm, my post didn’t say anything about this but for the record I disagree with these other Kelly Rueds and hope I’m not being judged by their collective ruckus 0_0
> If she feels raped, who the hell are you to argue?
You should become a prosecutor. I eagerly await seeing you try to use that line in court.
> If she feels raped, who the hell are you to argue?
>You should become a prosecutor. I eagerly await seeing you try to use that line in court.
We aren’t in court. Are you even following the context of this discussion? We aren’t even talking about criminal physical rape. I’m paraphrasing an online event that I was NOT an eye-witness to using the victim’s husband’s words instead of the griefers’ perspective. Main difference between Dibbell’s paper and the reuter’s editorial for those of you who still don’t get it: Dibbell acknowledged the perspective of the recipient of the griefing while the reuters article dismissed the Graef’s description in favor of the griefer’s/outside observer’s idea of what Anshe should have felt like (not like it was cyber rape porn, apparently!). I’m not accusing anyone of a real life crime nor am I arguing that what happened to Anshe was equal or interchangeable with a physical rape. Court doesn’t come into this and it’s rather foolish to argue with someone’s feelings. Can you tell someone they don’t feel violated if they say they do? Why bother? What satisfaction did dozens of people gain by commenting the obvious observation that Anshe wasn’t literally raped. No shit, really? Keep the profound observations coming.
I love the irony that I’m somehow abusing the precise legal connotations of “rape” in the eyes of someone calling themselves rapewaffle. The Graefs use the word rape to describe their feelings about a sexually themed griefing attack and they get ripped a new one by the, uh, open-minded free-speech loving types online but if they’d just called their SL alt rapewaffle that would be totally inoffensive.
>We aren’t even talking about criminal physical rape.
No, what we are doing is equivocating about it.
Which is despicable. Simply using the word in a flippant manner is not.
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