Online gaming is great stuff, I dare say many millions of people would tend to agree, but has it gone too far?
At the beginning of June, a Chinese gamer was given a suspended death sentence after he murdered a fellow gamer (and friend) after his virtual sword was sold by his friend for a meer $850.
This week, BBC news has a small article about the photo journalist Robbie Cooper who recently released a gallery, under the title Alter Ego, which peeks into the virtual world of gamers, and puts real faces to the virtual faces a lot of us see in Avatars. He recently extended from US and Europe to include Asia, which shows some rather interesting stuff on what virtual gaming is doing.
For example, the BBC covered this story which goes into how people are making real money from the virtual games. An example is Qing Xu Wei who reported making about $1300 a month for “Power-levelling” users. The news story has several other examples including one showing somebody earning $70,000 a year drawing costumes for characters.
E-Bay is reported to be littered with gaming stuff, showing $9 million worth of trades in 2003 in the games section.
It’s even gone so far as to have forced South Korea to have a police unit setup to work on in-game crimes…
So it brings the point up… has onling gaming gone too far?