Well I've been debating about posting this but I don't see anything wrong with doing so.
What you're about to read is my Discursive essay for my Intermediate 2 English folio. I wouldn't recommend trying to copy it.
It talks about the subject of Avatars and what is the distinction between murder of a person and murder of an avatar.
Just do you know, I do not think that deleting an Avatar is murder, at least not yet, quite simply, the Avatar is not aware and therefor it is not alive and cannot be murdered.
(btw, it's not finished yet, still got to find a title, suggestions welcome, and I've also gotta write a bit more in places)
An Avatar is the computer representation of a real person in a Virtual World. In some of the more technologically advanced countries such as South Korea and Japan, it is against the law and punishable by prison sentences to delete another persons avatar. Some even call this 'Murder'. But is it really murder?
Murder in the real world is defined as the unlawful killing of a person. To be a person, it has to be flesh and blood, tangible and alive. Therefore if it's not alive it cannot, by conventional standards, be killed.
In a case from Japan, a woman permanently deleted both the avatar and account of her ex-husband. Many people may think at this point, “So what? What’s the big deal…just create a new avatar and get back to the game.” Such a cavalier attitude shows a lack of understanding for the psychology of virtual worlds and the people who inhabit them. Those that inhabit these spaces often do so for long periods of time. They put in hundreds of hours, over many years into these virtual world environments carefully moulding and crafting their character avatars. They have fought quests and battles and have earned vast amounts 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 to does all of the personalization of the avatar as well as the associated virtual goods. Hundreds of hours of work gone in an instant, not to mention the devastating loss to the creator of said avatar, which in turn makes them the victim of the crime as the Avatar is not aware or sentient.
Anthropomorphizing of an avatar is nothing new. In fact the word 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 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 the player– could feel like an attack… perhaps even the killing of a part of one’s 'soul'. However it could be argued that it is vastly different from the murder or unlawful killing of the human being the avatar was meant to represent.
How would most law enforcement agencies respond to this case? If it were a murder in the real world the investigators would seal off and be forensically examining the area for DNA and a murder weapon. In the Virtual world however you couldn't search for DNA but you could search for what is the equivalent to computer fingerprints. Every computer has it's own unique fingerprint, despite all attempts to cover ones tracks, there will always be a record that is traceable to the perpetrators computer, whether it be their IP address or just a few stray lines of hexadecimal code at the bottom of an email. The only way of destroying this evidence is to demagnetise the hard-drive and therefor completely erasing all traces, but only on that computer. If something is transmitted across the internet, it's out there, theoretically forever.
Of course when this case occurred, the link 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, an avatar could become fully integrated with the human being it represents. If so, what will be the future meaning of “avatar murder” as time marches on?
That said, it seems that the police in Japan made the right decision in this case not to charge the woman with murder but instead with unauthorized access to a computer system.
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