Virtual World Crime

This presentation investigates virtual-world crime in a time of rapid population growth in virtual world communities. As a newly emergent practice that disrupts the formal logics with which we construct and regulate social order, virtual-world crime can attune our attention to some of the ways that posthuman embodiment is reordering the social body and its regulatory institutions. What are the ways that subjects circumvent within virtual worlds social and economic conditions of the “real-world”? How do these practices become “criminal”? How do subjects experience “crimes” that violate their informational bodies and in what ways do virtual-world “crimes” articulate with material conditions? How are regulatory institutions reshaping what constitutes the “criminal”?

Focusing on cases of griefing, property theft and sexual assault in Second Life, and with the aid of in-world photography and in-world and “real” world ethnographic accounts, as well as discourse analysis, this study explores the ways subjects perceive and experience virtual crime.