When Qiu Chengwei reported the theft of his "dragon saber" he was laughed out of the police station. So the 41-year-old online games player decided to take matters into his own hands.
Swapping virtual weapons for a real knife, he tracked down the man who had robbed him of his prized fantasy possession and stabbed him to death.
Qiu is now facing a possible death sentence in a Shanghai court case which has highlighted concern about the social, psychological and economic impact of one of China's fastest-growing industries.
A spate of suicides, deaths by exhaustion and legal disputes about virtual possessions have been blamed on Internet role-playing games, which are estimated to have more than 40 million players in China.
Qiu's favorite game was Legend of Mir III, a South Korean game which is a huge hit throughout Asia.
It took him hours in front of a computer to win the dragon saber, one of the game's most valuable weapons.
He used a feature of the game to lend it to Zhu Caoyuan, who reportedly sold it without his permission for 7,200 yuan (US$870).
Although this is considerably more than the average monthly wage, the police told Qiu that they could do nothing because the law does not recognize virtual property.
He has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Zhu, a crime that can carry the death penalty.
The number of Internet users is estimated to have doubled from under 60 million in 2002 to more than 120 million.
More than a third are believed to be game players, creating one of the world's most lucrative online markets. The operators revenue has grown by more than 40 percent in each of the past two years.
Shanda Networking, the biggest online game company with at least two million users at any given time of the day, more than doubled profits last year.
The national leadership said recently that the country's biggest skill shortage was of Internet game developers.
The information ministry estimates that China needs 600,000 online game technicians to fight off foreign competition. But there is also growing alarm about the social consequences. The government has cracked down on unlicenced Internet cafes, which the official news agency called "hotbeds of juvenile crime and depravity."
Newspapers are filled with reports of Internet-game related crimes and tragedies, such as the suicide in January of a boy of 13 who left notes saying he was so addicted to online games that he had difficulty distinguishing between reality and virtual reality.
Last March, two students in Chongqing fell asleep on a railway track after an all-night Internet session, and a 31-year old Legend of Mir addict reportedly dropped dead after a 20-hour session. Many of the crimes are related to the thefts of virtual possessions.
Hard-core players invest so much time and money into building a powerful online character that the loss or theft of a virtual identity prompts some to take violent action.
At the Shanda customer complaints office in Shanghai, where the staff work behind reinforced glass panels, an adviser, Cassie Fan, said: "We get about a thousand complaints a week. I have been threatened on several occasions. People put so much time and energy into the games that some get extremely upset."
One customer was so enraged that he set fire to himself, suffering serious burns.
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
DARK WARNINGS: If Trump survives his court trials, neither the Supreme Court nor the US Constitution could stop him from becoming president for life, a ‘Post’ column said Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to rule out abusing power if he returns to the White House after Fox News host Sean Hannity asked him to respond to growing criticism of his rhetoric. The Republican presidential front-runner has talked about targeting his rivals — referring to them as “vermin” — and vowed to seek retribution if he wins a second term for what he argues are politically motivated prosecutions against him. As Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primary, US President Joe Biden has stepped up his own warnings, contending that Trump is “determined to destroy American democracy.” “Under no
Seventeen people died and 11 were injured when a passenger bus careered off a road on a “killer curve” and plunged down a mountain in the central Philippines, officials said yesterday. The bus was traveling in Hamtic municipality in Antique province when the crash happened on Tuesday afternoon, Antique Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office head Roderick Train said. Seven people were in critical condition in a hospital and four others were stable, Train said, describing the section of road as “accident prone.” One Kenyan national was among those killed, and a second Kenyan was among those critically injured. The bus, which came from
RSS