No, what we are doing is equivocating about it.

Which is despicable. Simply using the word in a flippant manner is not.

>You should become a prosecutor. I eagerly await seeing you try to use that line in court.

We aren’t in court. Are you even following the context of this discussion? We aren’t even talking about criminal physical rape. I’m paraphrasing an online event that I was NOT an eye-witness to using the victim’s husband’s words instead of the griefers’ perspective. Main difference between Dibbell’s paper and the reuter’s editorial for those of you who still don’t get it: Dibbell acknowledged the perspective of the recipient of the griefing while the reuters article dismissed the Graef’s description in favor of the griefer’s/outside observer’s idea of what Anshe should have felt like (not like it was cyber rape porn, apparently!). I’m not accusing anyone of a real life crime nor am I arguing that what happened to Anshe was equal or interchangeable with a physical rape. Court doesn’t come into this and it’s rather foolish to argue with someone’s feelings. Can you tell someone they don’t feel violated if they say they do? Why bother? What satisfaction did dozens of people gain by commenting the obvious observation that Anshe wasn’t literally raped. No shit, really? Keep the profound observations coming.

I love the irony that I’m somehow abusing the precise legal connotations of “rape” in the eyes of someone calling themselves rapewaffle. The Graefs use the word rape to describe their feelings about a sexually themed griefing attack and they get ripped a new one by the, uh, open-minded free-speech loving types online but if they’d just called their SL alt rapewaffle that would be totally inoffensive.

You should become a prosecutor. I eagerly await seeing you try to use that line in court.

First up, fuck no. I own land in SL and I have been griefed on it many times and have had objects, replicating boxes, scripted weapons and a ton of things I ‘don’t allow on my land’ still affect me on my land (and yeah I know how to use LL’s fabulous business-service grade land-management tools). ;p

You don’t have full control when your neighbor has a dev kit and is located a couple virtual inches from your virtual property. Multiverse and similar platforms will finally give people true control over a free player-driven MMO space but SL is not designed to allow much privacy or control when you are on your land. You have close to zero control when you are visiting any other location in the world. And for people who don’t understand why Anshe sat there during the attack you’ve probably never been pummeled with shit during a huge press con that you really wanted to continue with (or experienced the crippling lag in SL that accompanies object attacks like the flying cocks). Saying the victim can “flee” is kind of a moot point in real life when someone pelts you with a stream of projectiles. People don’t say “why didn’t you dodge it you stupid mofo?” and blame the victim for poor reflexes. ;p

As to the folks who keep saying I called Anshe’s flying dildo attack “rape” please read my post (not just the selective blog quotes here) and the reuters article I linked to where Anshe’s husband describes the incident as cyber rape porn. I used the victim’s terminology. If she feels raped, who the hell are you to argue?

Logically, you have to consider how offline behaviors map to virtual worlds. Theft is not the same, harassment is not the same, and sexual assault is not the same. Human behaviors adapt to new environments but people’s underlying motives are the same. If someone seeks to use sexual words or imagery as a means to humiliate, harm, or dominate someone, how can you say actions of that type have no *possible* relationship to sexual violence in the real world? It doesn’t trivialize literal physical rape at all to discuss ethical parallels in virtual worlds where *the physical does not come into play* and violence takes on entirely psychological forms.

Harassment is no more accurate than “rape” because this was (presumably) not an ongoing problem but an isolated “attack.” Griefing doesn’t do it justice because of the sexual nature of the attack any more than physical assault does justice to offline assaults of a sexual nature. We lack the vocabulary to discuss these issues but apparently everyone has the verbal aptitude to call me moronic for trying to discuss the subject with imperfect terminology for attacks like this. Griefing is a moronic term that’s overused as a catch-all for any sort of undesirable online behavior. Good thing offline social codes and criminal laws differentiate between undesirable actions with a finer granularity. :p

“The Kelly Rueds of the world would argue rather vociferously that players forming an emotional attachment with a game world is not only natural but necessary for the ultimate enjoyment of the experience”

Hm, my post didn’t say anything about this but for the record I disagree with these other Kelly Rueds and hope I’m not being judged by their collective ruckus 0_0