. . . is not possible. Sorry for the bait and switch, but Simon Parkin has posted an editorial at Gamasutra about this very issue. His main point is that, although the postapocalyptic RPG Fallout 3 has a fairly open world that leaves you free to be as noble or horrible as you like, the game makes special exception for the sanctity of young life and this ostensibly moral design decision says something sinister about games as a medium.

The problem boils down to this: without the designers’ invisible hand, the game doesn’t make a very convincing argument against killing kids. There are a lot of reasons why making the argument would be difficult, but most of them revolve around the idea that games are entertainment, and being punished for murder isn’t very entertaining. More subtly, the idea that designers need to police your moral behavior suggests that they think you’re learning morality from the games you play.

Cynical readers could probably argue that the designers are only really worried about how they’ll be perceived, rather than by the consequences of their design decisions on players. However, it really does seem like there should be some serious problems (gameplay or psychological) with being a horrible person. Go give the article a read and post some suggestions for what to do with this problem if you have any ideas.

No, Jack Tompson has not been granted a position on the writing staff. Instead, a 43 year old Japanese woman has been arrested for hacking the account of a 33 year old Japanese male. The catch is why she did it: their MMORPG characters had suffered a messy virtual divorce, so the spurned lover accessed her ex-husband’s Maple Story account and killed his character in a fit of vindictive rage.

The alleged hacking occurred after the pair had shared usernames and passwords, an accidental version of the social engineering that usually goes into MMORPG accounts. More interesting is the fact that this is a crime of passion. The woman has been quoted as saying, “I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry.” So, on impulse, she committed an act of (virtual) violence on her onetime partner. She has been transported 600 miles to be detained in the jurisdiction where her ex-husband lives, and faces fines up to $5000 or 5 years in jail.

With ponzi schemes, black market virtual economics, and now impulse murder in virtual space, it begs the question of how much crime we can stuff under the umbrella of hacking. Although the virtual murder resulted in no bodily harm for anyone, the victim in this case has lost time and resources. So at what point does virtual become physical injury? More importantly, how do we manage the legal ramifications of intersection between virtual and physical?