Married in SL and RL, divorced in SL and RL, but killing is going way too far

It’s been awhile, but one of our own VTOR authors, Weirdharold went through an SL marriage and divorce. He never tied the knot in real life, thankfully in retrospect, like Amy Taylor from the UK did. Ms. Taylor’s fate is retold by the great big geek:

the two met online in 2003 and married in 2005 both physically and in a lavish Second Life ceremony. According to Ms. Taylor they spent as much of their time together in the virtual world as they did in the physical one. When she suspected her husband’s Second Life avatar of cheating she hired a virtual private detective to catch him in the act.

The virtual private detective was a type of service in SL I didn’t realize existed and it even has its own name, cyber spying:

Last month, a 43-year-old Japanese woman killed her virtual husband after he broke off their relationship on the popular game MapleStory, where the two met. Spouses neglected by their partners’ constant video-game or Internet use have banded together, calling themselves “cyber widowers” or “gamer widows.” Cyber spying is also common.

Darius wrote about Maple Story back in October 2007 and it seemed a little too cartoonish to interest me at the time. Seems like there is more virtual to reality stuff going on there than I imagined.

Killed, seriously? I’m all for living your virtual life to the fullest and even taking some aspects of it out of the virtual world, but killing somebody for what was done inside a virtual world? That’s crazy. And if there are too many stories like this, it will just make real world courts clamp down and make the virtual world increasingly restrictive. Where is the fun in that?