Ruth Fertig, writing for the womensrights.change.org site, says:
She goes on to say that
And concludes by saying
I am not sure I see how even stalking charges might apply if the object of the stalk is an avatar, with no threat of a physical connection to a real person. But I don’t play these games, so maybe I’m missing something.
ETA: the title should say “harassment” instead of assault.
I think this is silly. The only thing at a stake is the emotional state of the person being harassed. They should suck it up. Just like theft in an online game shouldn’t be considered larceny in real life, neither should harassment be a crime. If criminal courts got involved, then the games would simply be untenable. You just wouldn’t be able to have MMOs at all. The game should have mods, or you should simply stop playing the game if the mods are not to your liking.
Beyond absurd.
To be sure there are jerks in any online game and they certainly harass other players.
Generally this is best solved by the Game Masters (GMs). They can apply a variety of online punishments to the people who do this.
While annoying anyone sitting at home who switches this to actual sexual harassment in their head has issues of their own. They need to stop playing the game and seek professional help.
Yeah, this sound kinda silly, as it’s a game, and any corrective action should come from the moderators.
But I can see some legal issues cropping up in other situations as we spend more and more of our time in cyberspace.
The column mentions this factor, but with (obviously) a different take on it:
Some of voodoo works like how it was described in the OP. An spiritual or in this case virtual act of sexual assault can be imposed on another. If the victim has issues related to sexual assault, even from childhood and or repressed that person has a open door for such exploitation, and can bring back the feelings of the past event.
In this case the victim is pretty helpless, which if that relates to her past can trigger real issues.
While such situations can be intentionally set up by the person doing it, it is normally not his intent to traumatize. We have all experienced what we assumed to be a harmless joke, to really hurt deeply someone. That is similar, there are issues that the joke has brought up, while the intent was nowhere near that.
This woman has been given a opportunity to find out why it bothered her so much, to hunt out the root cause and be healed, or to run and hide, and to blame this person for what was done to her long ago by someone else IMHO.
In games where the in-game stuff can have a real world value I could see in-game theft being considered actual theft.
Note that most online games have items (money, special items, etc.) that have a real world value but that is outside the game’s mechanics. I play EVE Online and everything in the game is contractually the property of the game developer. People selling stuff outside the game is against the rules. Since the developer owns it you cannot seek reparations in court for an in-game theft.
Most games work like that but some have developed a model where in-game stuff has an intended real-world value.
So can music and books and TV shows and movies.
How far should we contort ourselves to avoid inadvertently upsetting someone?
The “flashback/trigger” argument comes up a lot on certain blogs/sites–for both rape and eating disorder triggers. In fact on some sites, they’ll ask you not to post your measurements/or weight and height when talking about food or eating issues (or edit them out) because they could be triggering. I’ve seen stuff like this mentioned as being triggering for rape victim, or this.
I’ve seen people talk about an ad where a man is giving a woman a “I really want to do you!” look (IN AN AD) and a woman posting about how seeing this ad in public made her feel unsafe as a woman alone, and blah blah blah rape culture.
I’m all for sensitivity but sometimes it goes a little too far. How do these people walk out into the world without getting mind raped?
Step 1: Contact a game GM, report the harrasser, providing a clear description of what was happening. Include the names of witnesses, of anyone volunteers to substantiate the claim.
Step 2: Log out.
It’s only fun for this guy because he found someone that was obviously bothered by his actions. It’s upsetting the woman because she has to watch what is going on. So shut down the computer and walk away for a while. The guy will be bored and move on.
Sony would be idiots if they don’t respond to this. They do not want to get a reputation for having this going on or they will be losing customers.
Sony is a lousy game management company, or at least they were when I left SOE games for WoW and COX.
That said, the place to deal with in game harassment is–in game. Every mmorg I’ve played has some mechanism for reporting abusive/harassing conduct. There are also sometimes…self help mechanisms…available. In Everquest, some asshole started stealing my kills while I was trying to level a lower-level toon. Fine and dandy. I switched over to my raid level Druid, and just happened to see the harassing player looking for a teleport, something Druids are able to provide. So, without revealing Oak as the “big brother” of the “newbie” this guy harassed earlier, I grouped with him and agreed to teleport him.
At this point is should be observed that the harassing player was a drow elf. Drow are evil, and generally killed on sight by the guards in all of the good-aligned areas. Druids, in addition to being generally awesome, had the ability to “bind souls”–meaning they can fix the location a killed player will re-spawn after a death.
So Oak grouped with this evil drow, and teleported him right next to the Druid Trainer in Surefall Glade–bastion of Druidic goodness. I got the bind off right as the Druid Trainer killed the guy for the first time. A few seconds pass…and the asshole Drow respawns…right next to the Druid Trainer, who kills him again. This went on for several minutes, and Surefall Glade was littered with Drow corpses.
Did I mention that in Everquest, each death carried a penalty of lost experience points, and that it was entirely possible to lose one or more levels by dying repeatedly?
Guy sent me several unflattering /tells, finally demanding “WHY?”. I reminded him of his prior misconduct towards what he thought was a defenseless newbie. Then I placed him on ignore. 
They can’t because they are not dealing with the root cause, but only looking at the trigger person and assigning blame to him and sometimes herself, sometimes God.
It is like someone put a ‘kick me’ sign on her back, and when she goes outside people kick her, which she files assault charges against, and these people get thrown in jail, yet it keeps happening, making her reluctant to go outside. Until she is ready to walk through the original issue and discover that a person put that sign on her and remove it, it will continue.
Certainly I can sexually harrass someone over the phone, or with lewd emails or via skype or whatever. I don’t really see how a online game is any different then other forms of remote communication. I’m not sure that the actual act described in the article counts as such harasement, but in general I think its pretty obvious that such harassment could (and presumably does) happen and steps should be taken to prevent it.
The fact that it’s a game makes it seem different, though, to me. If a random stranger calls up and breathes heavy, that’s different than if you were playing some telephone game (though the analogy falls apart here, I don’t know any telephone games). I just would draw a line between a random stranger coming up to you and harassing you, and someone doing it in a game where it’s already agreed that stuff isn’t real. I mean…say, you were playing a role play game in real time, and one of your friends is really sloshed and he says something like, “OK, my character gropes your characters tits,” and you get pissed off at him. Is that really sexual harassment? Does the game context make a diff?
Again with the logging off. I’ve spent a lot of time in a Second Life-based MMORPG. The setting is one that promotes a lot of for-lack-of-a-better-word forceplay stuff, as well as BDSM. And obviously explicit sex. It’s an out-and-out adult community. I, however, don’t partake; if someone tries it, I politely inform them OOC that I’m not interested. If it progresses–and, honestly, that’s only ever happened once–a combination of mute + IMing a GM has taken care of the situation quite nicely.
Sony should be taking care of this, from a rules enforcement standpoint, or at least from a customer service standpoint. It’s not a criminal offense. It’s annoying. And, frankly, if you’re at the point where such actions are unthinkable under the stress of the moment. . .well, you should probably not be in that environment to begin with. You can’t call the cops on someone for being a jerk.
Certainly some things are permissible in a game that aren’t in real life. In general though, my understanding is that the line between harassment is when the other person makes it clear that your sexual advances are unwanted and you persist. I don’t think being in a game makes a difference there, if someone says their character is groping you and you tell them to quit it, and the continue with the lewd suggestions, I’d say its harassment.
You can call them for someone persisting in clearly unwanted sexual advances though.
If he does it repeatedly, after I ask him to stop, then that is paradigmatically sexual harassment.
You said you don’t think it’s harassment because he’s talking about what one character does to another character. But that doesn’t seem relevant. Regardless of the fact that the language is in terms of characters, it is very clear which actual person is being targeted by the remarks, by means of remarks about her in-game character.
Recall that sexual harassment includes not only sexual acts, but sexual comments as well, even sexual comments not about or directed at the victim.
I tend not to think that this should be a criminal matter, but I’m not sure this is the best reason why. To draw an analogy to sports for a moment - if I’m Tom Brady, and I get tackled, I don’t have a cause of action for assault - that’s just football. Even if the tackle results in a concussion, knee injury, whatever - still probably no cause of action. People can voluntarily and knowingly assume certain risks when they play a game. But, on the other hand - if Tom Brady gets tackled, and then his tackler proceeds to kick the heck out of him while he’s down until his own team drags him off - then, by all means, Brady has a cause of action for assault. He voluntarily consented to a certain level of violence - but not more.
Analogizing to this “Home” game - a player may consent to certain forms of misconduct from other players. (Getting killed/looted/insulted, whatever). But it doesn’t seem immediately absurd to think that there might be a higher level of bad conduct that players aren’t implicitly consenting to. Perhaps this category, including sexual harassment, could be in the same category as harassing emails.
Or not - truth be told, I’m more than a little leery of criminalizing conduct which seems so minor, and so readily avoided, that it’s a non-issue. On yet another hand, I’d be reluctant to employ that argument in the “real world” - I’d never tell a woman that her best solution is to simply avoid the popular local bar where the staff all make a point of groping her as soon as she gets in, because “after all, you don’t have to go there.”
In short: I think this is a hard, nuanced issue. And I don’t envy Sony for having to come up with a solution.
Is it sexual harassment when you’re in environment where you aren’t compelled to be and you experience sexual comments? Like, would a friend of yours repeatedly making a ref to your breast or ass or penis or whatever be illegal? Keeping in mind that they’re not actually threatening to do anything, but are definitely making sexual comments.
I’m just extremely wary of equating “virtual groping” with real groping, though. If the creepy guy at the bar were saying sexual stuff to her I think that might be a better analogy. But again, would that be illegal or just sleazy?
Rumor has it that most of the female characters, particularly the hottest/sluttiest looking ones, are controlled by male players.
That aside, we’re talking about pixels groping other pixels. That’s online thuggery, but does not rise to the level of criminal activity in my book. The actual players don’t know each other in most cases, and may be located on different continents. An in game penalty of having the harasser’s account suspended and/or canceled for repeated violations is the appropriate remedy.
