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by Teresa Martin

The big news this week is the US election. But guess what, I'm not going to talk about it. Hold on for something completely different!

That's right, in today's column we're going to visit Japan. And MapleStory. And the weirdness where the virtual world and the state known as Reality are bumping against each other. The Matrix, anyone?

Seriously, a few weeks ago a woman in Japan was sent to jail. For a crime committed in a virtual world called MapleStory.

MapleStory is a happy looking Massively Multiplayer Online Game from Korea. (www.maplestory.com) It features big-eyed anime-style characters who do quests and meet and get married and presumably live happily ever after. It's a fictional fantasy world where you create an avatar and let your alter-ego frolic. For millions of people, MMOGs provide an entertainment alternative, more interactive than television, and a way to spend time role playing with others.

These worlds are interactive FICTION. They are not real, are they?

According to an Associated Press story, on one fine day last May in Japan, a 43-year old piano teacher entered the game and - to her horror - was abruptly divorced by her husband, a 33 year old office worker. So she deleted him.

Let's look at this again. The woman created a character in a virtual world. The character married another character inside the game. Two fictional avatars - game pieces, if you will - were married. The humans behind them did some role-play in the virtual world and apparently shared login and password information with each other in the real world.

Then, one real person wanted to move his fictional character on to other interactions in the game. And so this fictional character divorced his fictional avatar wife. The other real person reacted in a very real world way: she was furious.

"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry" the real woman behind the avatar is quoted as telling officials.

So she performed a piece of fiction that more than one jilted woman has dreamed of: she deleted the lying cheating cad who dumped her. In this case, she used the login and passwords that were exchanged in the real world to delete the fictional louse of a spouse character in the virtual world. Click, click. You are gone.

As you can image, the real human behind the divorce-initiating fictional character was not terribly happy to lose his avatar. And he complained to police. A crime had been committed!

In late October the woman - the real one in the real world, not the fictional avatar - was arrested and taken more than 600 miles to a jail in the region where the man - the real one, not the fictional avatar - lives.

Is this making your head hurt yet?

The real woman - who has neither threatened nor harmed any real people - was charged with illegally accessing a computer. If convicted, she could face up to five years in prison or a $5000 fine. In the real world.

Science fiction lives that area between what could be plausible real science and where the imagination takes that science. William Gibson's 1996 Iduro blurred the lines between real and avatar. Was the object of the rock star's desire a virtual pixel based fantasy or is their rumored engagement real? Other stories have explored the same what-if land: what if the virtual is treated as real? What is real, anyway? Je pense, je suis? And if the avatar thinks does she then exist?

And, if she deletes her avatar husband, is it murder, computer misbehavior, or simply role-playing in a game? Hey, it's just a game. Isn't it?

All across the globe, people play in virtual spaces. Virtual worlds have developed very real internal market economies. Virtual dollars and real dollars have markets of exchange - both company sponsored and free market enabled via marketplaces like eBay and payment services like PayPal. The charge on your credit card certainly isn't virtual ... even if the invisibility cloak is.

Second Life has become a meeting spot for virtual representations of real people and real companies. If your avatar says something to another avatar in Second Life, is it speaking for you? Is it representing you? Or it is all just make believe?

It all feels a bit surreal. Afterall, MapleStory is just a game ... isn't it?