By Alexandra Radius
Recently, an episode of the show CSI:New York featured a cross-over between the show’s fictional reality and the virtual reality site Second Life. As well as watch the programme, viewers were encouraged to also enter Second Life, enabling them to chase the killer into a virtual world and solve the investigation in a virtual Crime Lab.
It’s a great promotion for CSI, helping to maintain viewer attention during the broadcast episode, and bringing CSI younger, hipper fans in Second Life… But is this just another example of bringing onscreen violence even further into our homes? Is the gap closing between reality and imagination?
Some recent incidents in Second Life show that the borders between fact and fiction are getting increasingly blurry. When the Front National, the far-right French political party, set up a presence in Second Life, protesters showed up and soon turned to (virtual) violence. As the players can't actually hurt each other, weapons were mostly meaningless, but the protesters managed, through force of numbers, to bog down that part of the world – a denial-of-service attack carried out in real-time.
Worse still, certain users of Second Life have been engaging in paedophile acts during the game and exchanging real child porn images. I could go further and imagine Second Life being used to plan a terrorist attack... I am just wondering what will be the next sordid story to emerge from Second Life.
In Second Life, there is no police force to control the abuse of people. One solution could be to establish an external body that sets boundries or obliges users to provide a certain amount of verifiable personal information in order to access all the functionalities of Second Life.
The concept of TV/internet cross-overs is still interesting because it potentially opens up a future of real interactivity – however, I still think we need to put certain barriers in place to make the virtual world a better world to live in!
STOP PRESS: Looks like one police force in Europe is taking virtual crime seriously!
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