Well... it's a tricky one. It's a game, right? I credit gamers on the whole with the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Since the whole narrative of the game is combat in the first place, with thousands of virtual deaths per hour, you could say it's appropriate in context. It's also arguably more fun - and that's why people play.
>I credit gamers on the whole with the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.
This is somewhat tangential, but research on the influence of video games on behavior has been showing that games can and do indeed have measurable effects on behavior and mood. It's quantifiable; it's certainly not as strong as Jack Thompson (woah, nostalgia) would want you to believe, but it's there. From what I understand, the long-standing rejection of this idea by gamers is a consequence of cognitive dissonance.
If it's qunantifiable, then we know how big it is, then we know how big it isn't and are not justified in invoking video games as an explanation for all human misbehavior by people who have played video games, just the issues they actually cause.
Maybe this is where I disagree and didn't make it clear. I have no problem with banning an account. No one would even notice that this account was banned probably.
What I have problem with is the stance of the admin/dev/supervisor/whatever towards a user who fund and exploited a bug.
Humiliating publicly a game character was never in the context of the game. The character didn't lose a battle, the admin took over the account by force and eliminated the character, then he published the video for other users to see. Imagine if the death sentence in the US was not an electric chair but a Colosseum-like show with lions eating men alive, broadcasted on national TV. They were going to die anyway, so why not make up a show, use the money for ... I don't know, public education/research? :-) - would that make the action appropriate/ethical/understandable?
This is not another virtual death otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it, would we?
we are talking about this one for the same reason some thefts in eve get media attention and others do not.
They decided to send a press release out.
But, it was a nice job equating virtual pixels with real life death. Do you have similar views regarding the fact that I just had to torture an NPC with an electronic prod?
Since the whole narrative of the game is combat in the first place, with thousands of virtual deaths per hour, you could say it's appropriate in context. It's also arguably more fun - and that's why people play.