Chilling news for online gamers, or for anyone who identifies themself online, really:
Gamer arrested over computer link to knife murder of Matthew Pyke
David BrownA German computer gamer is being questioned by police over the murder of a university student after an apparent argument on an online discussion site.
Matthew Pyke, 20, who was found stabbed to death at his home in Nottingham, ran a website with his girlfriend dedicated to discussing the computer strategy game Advance Wars.
Days after his body was found, a German gamer calling himself David Heiss sent a message to Mr Pyke’s girlfriend apologising for “having caused so much trouble lately”.
Though it hardly matters now if you are pseudonymous; even the neophyte knows how to use network tools and resolve an IP address these days, witness the continual harassment of left-wingers by Michelle Malkin’s troop of flying buttmonkeys and of antifascists by website Redwatch [no link; you want it, google].
I see the amount of sheer blinding rage unleashed in some online gamers when they play and I can well imagine that to feel such extreme anger could carry someone with a lot of their ego invested in the game (forum, blog or comment thread) right over the edge.
But aren’t online communities self-regulating by consensus? Well no, of course not, no more so than RL. Other gamers may have been egging this dispute on, in which case they also bear responsibility for Matthew Pyke’s death:
Detectives are investigating if another fan of the game may have fallen out with Mr Pyke in cyberspace and then taken extreme revenge in real life.
Mr Pyke also published science fiction on the Wars Central site using the name Shade, and Mr Heiss, 21, contributed to the discussion forum under the name Eagle the Lightning.
One anonymous poster on the site forum suggested that other members may have known who was behind the killing. “We may know a lot of what was going on prior to the killing, but I, for one, am not going to say any more,” he said.
Online interactions are like icebergs – 80 per cent of the communication is going on off screen, inside the participant’s heads. We add tone and emphasis that are not actually there to rapidly scrolling text conversation – and even if using voice communication via headsets, there are still no physical cues. Entirely innocent comments can be horribly misconstrued.
Sometimes it doesn’t even matter what you say; there are those whose purpose in life is to take offence at something, anything, just to be able to respond with aggression and thereby flex a tiny little bit of power. Then there are those who just want to hurt or kill and are just looking for a pretext to do it. To put it somewhat bluntly, you never know when you’re dealing with a psycho – and if you’re female and identifiable as such, you can take all the above and quadruple it.
