I've been a mentor in the local schools for eight years.
There have been some happy times and some sad times, but what happened yesterday was the most devastating.
When I arrived, my mentee was eager to tell me what had happened to him at the library.
He goes there almost every day after school to play an online game with his pals.
He has been working on his prized character for about two years for two to four hours a day.
That's a lot of work.
I can't help wondering what else could have been accomplished with that amount of energy, but never mind.
This twelve-year old boy was practically in tears as he sputtered what had transpired.
It involved grand theft and ransom.
It seems that some Junior High school larcenists had purloined his prized game avatar and stolen all its attributes that had taken two years to acquire.
How would you feel if someone absconded with something you had so laboriously created? It's akin to child theft.
As he was finishing his tale of woe, his buddy walked into my office, which is really a closet, and unleashed his even sadder story.
It seems that not only had his character been stolen but horror of horrors, turned into a female.
To make matters worse, all of the avatar's hard-earned attributes had been stripped away in a cruel act of malicious mischief.
But, it was more than just malicious mischief.
The Junior High library larcenists had given these grammar school guys 24 hours to fork over 25 bucks if they wanted their avatars back intact, and time was running out.
How were these Junior High hooligans able to perpetrate this kidnapping? Turns out that the gullible grade school guys gave them their passwords because the big bullies promised to use their superior skills to improve the younger guys' characters.
How magnanimous.
But how could they be so evil? Maybe it's from playing games like Grand Theft Auto IV.
Do you think? Here were two demoralized and depressed grade-schoolers needing justice and not knowing where to turn.
Neither boy had a father, and I guess they looked to me as the next best thing.
I think they just wanted me to kick those bullies' butts.
I rose to the occasion by calling the library director on my Windows Mobile phone to make an appointment to discuss the matter right after school that day.
I wondered if I should call my lawyer and the chief of police too.
These junior hijackers needed to be brought to justice.
They needed a good spanking, but who would administer it? Maybe it would be a far crueler punishment to banish them from the library and trash their avatars.
That would show them.
At the library after school, we waited for the culprits to appear.
When they did, we descended on them like a pack of jackals.
Of course they denied everything and said they were just kidding about the ransom fee.
To save the day and resolve the situation, I proposed that the self-proclaimed innocents restore characters of equal prowess at their earliest convenience or suffer the consequences.
The consequences I hinted were library banishment, telling their parents, informing the police, and possible legal action because they had committed serious crimes.
I wanted them to be aware of the gravity of their transgressions.
Librarians, what would you do if this kind of thing happened at your library? By the way, the Junior High guys physically threatened the little guys if they did not turn over the computers.
Educators, Parents, Law enforcement officials and legal beagles, any comment? I also wonder how other kids in this age range would feel about this situation and how they would react if it happened to them.
Actually I understand that it is not all that uncommon.
It's sort of an online fact of life, part of living in the real world of cyberspace.
Now, dear reader, how do you feel about this situation? Do you think a real crime has been committed that involves grand theft and kidnapping? To establish grand theft, there usually has to be stolen property of a certain monetary value.
You could argue that an avatar has no real monetary value, but neither does a junker car, but if stolen would be grand theft.
How much value could you put on something that took two years to create? Stealing a personal creation with human and super-human attributes and holding it for ransom is a form of kidnapping.
Should we call in the FBI? At the very least, it's identity theft.
Actually, there is real value that can be attached to avatar assets.
There are people out there making a handsome living selling game commodities online to those who do not have the time or inclination to earn them.
The lazy ones are willing to pay real bucks for online game assets.
The commodity brokers rarely generate the goods themselves.
Instead, they organize nerd sweatshops in places like Mexico and China and pay chump change for the services of the foreign miners and sell the results for mucho wampum online.
So, you see, one could argue legally that grand theft has been committed here.
Should the perpetrators be tried as minors or adults? I just hope these digital delinquents don't grow up to be adult thieves and kidnappers--they are not off to a good start.
The line between online crimes perpetrated in games like Grand Theft Auto IV, and the real world can be transparent and present a whole new moral paradigm for the younger generation--a paradigm that our education and legal systems are perhaps not yet equipped to deal with.
Keep connected!