The below case is interesting.  It refers to the “murder of an avatar”…more on that in a moment.  First an overview.  Police in Japan arrested a woman after she accessed without authorization the computer of her husband and deleted his profile from the popular game Maple Story.  The woman said she did so in retaliation after her husband filed for divorce without advising her in advance and without any explanation.  The perpetrator in this case had access to her husband’s login credentials dating back to happier times in their marriage.

Now, on to avatar murder.  The Independent was clearing using some journalistic license in this case in referring to the murder of an avatar.  Good headlines like this sell newspapers, so a bit of sensationalism here and there should not be too shocking.  But let’s look at this issue more closely.  Was it murder?  What actually happened?

Well in this case from Japan, the woman permanently deleted both the avatar and account of her ex-husband.  So what, many of you say, just have it reset by Maple Story technical support.  Yeah, turns out, not so easy.  Every try to call for help at an airline to make a reservation?  Or a phone call to your credit card company?  A walk in the park compared to trying to reach an actual person at an MMORPG/or Virtual World company.  Almost all force users to reach them via email.  Reaching the right person who can actually help you, can take a really really long time.

Even if you did reach the right person, the most likely answer the victim in this case would likely receive is:  “I’m sorry sir, we cannot help you.”  Even if the MMORPG company did want to help, what if they no longer had access to the victim’s account to back it up?  What if they did not have a plan in place to help users in situations like this?  What if the server back-ups were destroyed or damaged? (One of the interesting side effects of cloud-computing is that users place their trust that the cloud will always be there….but what if all your hard earned work disappears?)

Many of you might be thinking, so what?  What’s the big deal…just create a new avatar and get back to the game.  Ah, but a such cavalier attitude betrays a lack of the psychology of MMORPG’s and virtual worlds.  Those that inhabit these spaces often do so for long, long periods of time.  Maybe 6, 12 or 20 hours a day…maybe over the past three or four years.  They put in hundreds of hours into these virtual world environments carefully molding and crafting their character avatars.  They have fought quests and battles and have earned vast amount of loot and virtual goods–all of which in the mind of the servers are tied to the owner’s account.

If the user’s account goes away, so too does all of the personalization of the avatar as well as the associated virtual goods.  Hundreds of hours of work gone in an instant.  But is it murder?  Well, anthropomorphizing of an avatar is nothing new.  In fact the world avatar comes from ancient Hinduism and is meant to be a manifestation or incarnation of a god on earth.  In modern times, avatars have come to mean representation of people on earth.  To a human being who chooses to represent himself via an avatar, as tens of millions are doing all over the world, the line separating the two is often blurred.  To some very avidly involved in virtual worlds and MMORPG’s in fact there is no difference at all.

Thus from a psychological perspective, one could certainly understand how the destruction of an avatar–a carefully crafted and highly evolved representation of oneself–could feel like an attack…perhaps even the killing of a part of one’s soul.  But I believe most would argue that it is vastly different from the murder or unlawful killing of the human being the avatar was meant to represent.  That said, it seems that the police in Japan made the right call in this case to charge the woman with unathorized access to a computer system.

How would most law enforcement agencies respond to this case?  How would a prosecutor, judge or jury?  Could the victim explain to anybody who did not inhabit a virtual world/MMORPG themselves how crushing a blow the loss had been?  Of course when this case occurred, the linkage between human and avatar was still rather tenuous. As time progresses and technology improves, people and avatars will grow closer and closer.  Eventually, they may even become indistinguishable from one another.  Through electronic implants, could an avatar become fully integrated with the human being it represents?  If so, what will be the future meaning of “avatar murder” as time marches on?