Internet Hunters

So i decided to post today on a topic i really only read about today. You see i was on cracked.com which is a stupid little internet comedy site that's actually not stupid at all, it's pretty funny! Anyways the article was about the "World of Warcraft" or WOW as it shall be known in this article. Essentially it was a list of reasons why WOW is worse than real life. Now i won't get into the WOW world too much but let's just say it's pretty intense. I mean i knew that video games were getting crazier and crazier, but this list still kind of blew my mind. Anyways #1 on the list was about online sex within the game. How the characters could strip down, and not necessarily make their characters have sex, but they could position them so that they were in sexual positions and then they would talk dirty to each other. So what does this have to do with internet hunting? Well they had a couple links to articles of what online sex in WOW had lead to. And i gotta say......WOW!

They had one instance of something that occurred in China. If you don't know anything about Warcraft, which i didn't until a couple hours ago, basically players form guilds and assume roles within these guilds. You could be a hunter, a priest, the leader....it all just depends how strong you are at the game and how long you've played, aswell as how much you've built up your character. You actually have to basically write a resume to get into a guild and they could string you along for months assigning you to menial tasks only to say in the end that you don't fit. Yes it's insane i know. Anyways this incident in China leads us to internet hunting. There was a husband and wife, and the wife had quit her job and basically just played WOW all day. The husband was also in the game but only cause he wanted to spend more time with his wife and he rarely actually entered the world. So she would play this all day and they had their own seperate computers. One day she was asleep and he went on hers to check his email. He noticed that she hadn't closed down WOW and he started reading her chat with the leader of her "guild". UH OH! Turns out she was having an affair with this guy. Possibly just an online affair too. It remains to be seen whether or not she had actually met this guy in person, but from the sound of their conversation it was entirely possible.

This is where the internet hunters come into play. The husband was none too pleased and publicly posted a message in a WOW chat room about what was going on. Then the crazy world of WOW took over. People started hunting down the guy in the game to try and get at him. The majority of his guild turned against him, and hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of gamers heard about the story and rose up against him. And then, in a mass protest of his actions, they organized a mass suicide......within the game. Where they all killed off their characters. It didn't stop there. Several of these gamers, or as i like to call them, Meganerds, decided to try and find out the guy's true identity. Which they were eventually successful in doing. They found a picture of him, they found his home and cell phone numbers, where he lived and where his family lived. He was bombarded by phone calls, emails, and people even harrassed him in public so much that he was forced to barricade him and his family in their house and not come out. He left school, and chat rooms went nuts with emails being sent to every possibly company they could think of with his picture and details of what he had done and urging them to not hire this man. Some of the messages went so far as to suggest that he and the woman he was adulterous with should be "beheaded" or "put in a pig cage and drowned." The husband of the woman eventually tried to come to his rescue and tried to rescind his claims of an affair but the harassment continued none the less. Was the affair morally wrong? Oh hell yeah. But this just serves as an example of the power of the internet. Especially in China where many people have become completley addicted and now when you enter an internet cafe in China you have to show identification in order to use a computer.

Another example of internet hunting that is slightly disturbing came from a video that was posted also in China. It was of a Chinese woman holding and cuddling with a cute kitten. She eventually puts the kitten on the ground, and uses her stiletto heel to impale it through the eye and then crush it's head. Sorry if that's a little graphic but that's what happened. Truly disgusting i know. However once people got wind of this video....well cue the internet hunters. Several decided to take it upon themselves to figure out who this woman was. They made an internet "Wanted" poster featuring her picture and what she had done and began to circulate it. Someone recognized the park she had committed the vile act in and responded. So once they had the locatoin it was only a matter of time before they discovered her identity. Turns out she was a nurse, and the guy filming was a DJ or something. Anyways both were found, and both were exposed, fired from their jobs, and eventually basically run out of town. Neither were charged with any crimes however because in China there are no laws against animal cruelty.

So we can all have our opinions on internet hunting, whether it's a good or bad thing. In both these cases the people in question had both been up to some unsavoury activities. But it is a little unsettling when you see how truly powerful the internet is. Especially with some of the pictures i have up on facebook! Already looking forward to coming to work someday and walking in and seeing a huge blown up poster of me wearing a women's bikini while my boss stands there and says, "Eric......we need to talk."

Any opinions on the matter? Cause i'd sure love to hear 'em!