A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday. Woman arrested for killing virtual reality husband – CNN.com.

Firstly, I don’t understand that someone would complain to the police about the “death” of an online avatar.

Secondly, I don’t understand how it is considered hacking when the person involved her willingly and knowingly gave over his login information and then did not change his password after “virtually divorcing” this woman.

In a related story, just recently a Dutch court imposed a real-world punishment for virtual theft. The case was pretty open-and-shut because there was physical assault involved. In short, a 16-year-old boy was charged with beating another teen in the victim’s room and stealing virtual items by making the teen log in to RuneScape and hand over money and items (read full story). I’d like to think that the punishment was more for the assault than the theft of online posessions.

I think that in this particular case it is not the theft that should have been the focus point, but the fact that a teenager physically assaulted and threatened another teen with a knife, all for the posession of virtual items in an online game.

I would write some silly rhetorical question like “What is the world coming to when people start physically assaulting other individuals for the posession of virtual items?”, but then I’d also have to raise a bunch of other points like why people physically abuse people for posession of items, or theft in general. We’re a greedy bunch, us humans. Luckily there are some nice people out there who don’t think that everything that belongs to others should belong to them.