“Should Gamers Be Prosecuted for Virtual Stealing?” written by Alex Weiss, talks about whether stealing items in video games should be illegal. In a strange supreme court ruling, they decided to convict a teenager of stealing to virtual items from another player in the game RuneScape. In this game players can work for long periods of time to get certain items but players can also go around sabotaging other players. In the situation ruled by the court, one player had spent many hours getting two very hard to get items and the second player stole these items. So, player one took it to the courts where they ruled that the time the one player put in gave the items monetary value. Alex states “Video games are not work or investments for which people should be compensated; they are escapism.” He also talks about his past in the MMO (Massive multiplayer online) game genre where he was once a thief and how putting this much value on virtual …show more content…
Eve is meant to be very risky and it has low to almost no punishment for bad behavior. WoW has very strict policies against misfits where if an item gets stolen the victim will get there stuff back and the thief will be punished, if one player mistreats another than he might get a temporary ban. RuneScape is kind of in between both of those games. It doesn’t use real world currency like Eve but it also doesn’t have any precautions against scammer, thieves, nor against inappropriate language. The company who made the game never out right said that the player couldn’t do what he did but they also didn’t help the victim at all. The Dutch Supreme Court is trying to punish a kid for actions permitted in the game. The laws of the virtual world are going against the laws of the real world. As a last thought Alex says, “Attempting to bring real-world law into virtual realms – and putting monetary value on time spent immersed in a virtual world – seems