A reality check on criminality in virtual reality

Chennai

At 50 paise a game, I grabbed the joysticks, wrenched it in delight while simultaneously tugging the buttons. In the process, I discovered myself transforming and becoming things I always dreamed about — a Tarzan who knocks the living daylights out of the jungle’s marauders, a saviour slaughtering the demons with machine guns.

I also found myself turning into a dragon slayer butchering the evil dragons. My time at the arcade was sheer bliss, a kind of rapture. Video games transported me into a bizarre world where I could be someone I craved and dreamed of while remaining who I was. It was a world where men could become women, women men, adults children, and human beings animals, superheroes or monsters.

A world where I could kill and go unpunished. A world where I could die but still be alive. So, when boredom overtook me during the recent lockdown, I decided to check out Virtuosity, one of Denzel Washington’s less well-known films that were pending on my bucket list. In the sci-fi flick, Washington plays Parker Barnes; an imprisoned police officer employed to hunt down a virtual reality killer played by Russell Crowe who gets out into the real world.

The villain is not a human being but a computer program named Sid 6.7, who turns a criminal in the Virtual Reality (VR) simulations. In 1995, when Virtuosity got released in theatres crimes happening in the virtual world seemed far out and unreal. Today, what got portrayed as sci-fi has turned into reality as criminals have joined these virtual worlds, and a full range of criminal activities are now present in the virtual space. Traditional real-world crimes happen every day in virtual worlds, including money-laundering, stealing intellectual property, traffic of child abuse pictures and even suspected terrorist activities.

Yet the concept of ‘virtual reality’ is new to law enforcement agencies around the world. Therefore, the new virtual worlds and societies extend a quirky set of challenges for the criminal justice system. Besides, the near-total absence of essential jurisprudence means that outlaws are always free to act with impunity. Virtual worlds often encompass components popular to other online activities, such as MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games).

MMORPGs are video games that enable thousands of players to enter a virtual world and interact concurrently. Participants can operate their own ‘cities and countries’ stand up armies to win wars and go on a diversity of ‘quests’ with their avatars. There are several virtual worlds and MMORPGs in existence today, with new ones appearing increasingly often. One of the most prominent virtual worlds is Second Life (SL), created by Linden Labs in 2003.

Among MMORPGs, the World of Warcraft (WoW) is probably the most popular in the world. Tens of millions of people explore these spaces every month. Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft independently has over 11 million active subscribers. Surprisingly, to many players, the virtual world is central, and the real world is lesser. Many have come to comprehend that their virtual world is the natural world and vice versa. For a few, their avatars are so real that anything that happens to their avatar makes a deep imprint on their actual persona.

As a result, the virtual universe witnesses all types of crimes reported in the physical world. Gamers could suffer from cyberbullying to identity theft. In Japan, the police apprehended a man for virtually perpetrating mugging sprees with software ‘bots’ in the online game Lineage II. The world’s first cyberspace rape was reported in virtual world called Lambda- MOO, in which a character named Mr Bungle using a ‘voodoo doll’ took control of the two avatars and then forced them to engage in sexual acts.

In October 2016, a journalist by name Ms Belamire reported that she suffered sexual assault while playing VR game QuiVR, using the HTC Vive. During the game, a gamer with the onscreen name of ‘BigBro’ first started to rub her breasts and later followed it up by rubbing her virtual crotch. Several other users of VR have reported similar experiences. In the game ‘The Sims Online’, a 17-yearold boy going by the in-game ‘Evangeline’ was discovered to have built a cyber-brothel, where customers would pay sim-money for minutes of cybersex.

In Japan, a 43-yearold woman grew so enraged after her online husband ‘divorced’ her in the interactive Maple Story game, that she committed a virtual murder by eliminating him. The woman, Mayumi Tomari, was later arrested by the Japanese police. Then, there was the killing in Russia of a 33-year-old member of the Platinum clan of an MMORPG guild by a 22-year-old member of the rivalrous Coo-clocks clan. When the two virtual gang members confronted each other in the physical city of Ufa, Russia, the 33-year-old got severely beaten to death.

In South Korea, a 22-year-old student named Choi and an accomplice manipulated a virtual world server and made approximately US$1.2 million. There have also been other instances where online game interactions have sparked real-world crimes. For example, Kimberly Jernigan of North Carolina, USA was arrested for trying to kidnap a boyfriend she’d met on ‘Second Life’. In future, VR may be increasingly used not only by criminals but by terrorists and anti-socials as well.

Hezbollah has developed its own shooter computer game named Special Force 2, which acts as a radicalisation medium for young jihadis. In the game, players earn points by launching Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns and becoming ‘suicide’ martyrs. A document leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that both the US and UK were spying on gamers by creating undercover avatars to snoop, recruit informers and perform mass interception between players in various games. Most police officers in the world may not have investigated any case involving a virtual world or MMORPG.

Though it may be tempting to ignore MMORPG crimes considering them virtual, therefore not ‘real’; police must remember that virtual crimes have real-world victims. The psychological and economic impact of virtual crimes on their victims is every bit real to their inhabitants, as is the physical world to most investigators. Finally, VR could be akin to spiritual reality. Unlike in reality, when we die in a video game, it’s not game over. Besides, VR like spirituality helps us have adventures in consciousness and explore our psyches through the mind-altering, dream-changing, ego-breaking VR technology.

— The author is director, Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC)