It's that it causes them to lose the line between reality and fantasy. It's not necessarily that the violence causes them to be more violent. Studies show that a similar thing happens to kids when they watch too much violence on TV. Maybe at that point, suspension of disbelief + time = reality. Maybe if you suspend your disbelief for too long, it's difficult to return to disbelief. Traditional fictional forms have a built-in escape hatch: the final curtain or the words, 'The End.' But the digital fictional world of SL, like real life, is 24/7. We can't control everything that happens to our character. And that changes everything by creating a fictional world with two key characteristics of the real world. But digital worlds such as SL have made us all creators and suspenders simultaneously. The contract works beautifully as long as there is a creator who does the creating and a reader or viewer who does the suspending of disbelief. This is a uniquely human sort of thing, a psychological and emotional contract that allows us to spend several hours caring about characters and events that aren't real. It has to do with a phrase you may have last heard in English class, 'suspension of disbelief.'įor thousands of years, storytellers have created fictional worlds, which we enter through our willingness to suspend our disbelief. The FBI has also been called in to SL to ensure that casinos there comply with US law.Īpparently, the line between fantasy and reality isn't so clear anymore. German laws against child pornography are so strict that many reasonable people believe they apply to acts that occur in digital worlds such as SL. Officials in Germany are looking into an incident involving sex between an adult and a child that occurred in SL. See how obvious the boundaries are when applied to fictional worlds we're familiar with such as those in literature and TV? But boundaries are not so obvious when applied to digital worlds. We'd have actresses on 'Law & Order' who play rape victims filing charges in the real world against the writers who created the characters who assaulted them. Because if the answer were yes, we'd have to start prosecuting authors who create characters that commit crimes against other characters. The answer to whether a crime was committed is no. I think I can help with their investigation.

The Washington Post recently reported that police in Belgium are investigating whether a crime had been committed. They want the real person who created the rapist avatar to be punished in real life for what his character did in Second Life. Recently, an avatar was allegedly raped, and some people want the perpetrator brought to justice. Occasionally things get out of hand, as often happens when cartoon characters get together. All the things we all do in our first lives. These ordinary people buy their avatars houses, open bank accounts for them, take them out to bars, and let them throw parties. These residents are avatars – animated cartoon-like characters – created by ordinary people who register to take part in Second Life. One of them is called Second Life (SL), and it's got 6 million residents.

There are digital worlds out there that most of us have no idea about.

Second life avatar