This Thanksgiving break I was able to catch up on several TV shows I'd been neglecting for some time. One of the TV shows I saw was Criminal Minds, which is a show that follows the FBIs fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit as they solve crimes.
Coincidentally, the episode this week's episode, The Wheels on the Bus, presented the scenario of the dangerous merging of boundaries between virtual worlds and reality. Briefly, the criminals in this episode (two brothers) had been playing a violent video game (Gods of Combat) for fun since their youth but as they grew older, their addiction to this game led to severe competition between the brothers. They became so involved in the game that they became super users and hacked the game to an extent where they became banned from the online server that ran the game. This spurred on what the viewers see in this episode where the brothers, angry from being banned and still very much addicted to the game, re-create the game in real life. They abducted a school bus of children, divided them into teams for each brother and created twisted, gruesome obstacles similar to those the virtual characters faced in the game, which led to the death of one of the children. I thoroughly enjoyed the episode for its creativity yet it was a strong reminder of how addictive violent virtual reality games are and (in a drastic example) what they can lead to.
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