IT WAS a match made in heaven. Dave Barmy was a 6ft 4in nightclub owner in his mid-20s, a slick dude with long dark hair and dressed in a snappy grey suit, sunglasses and a large gold cross. His Barbiesque wife Laura Skye was also in her mid-20s, a waiflike six-footer with hair like Ava Gardner's and a house like Madonna's.
If it sounds like the stuff of dreams then that's because it was. In reality, Barmy is 25-stone balding 40-year-old David Pollard, who lives on incapacity benefits and hangs around his bedsit in his jogging bottoms. Laura's real name is Amy Taylor an
d she is an unemployed waitress who cuts a less imposing figure than her cyberspace alter ego: just 5ft 4in, she tips the scales at 16 stone and has a straggly ginger mane.
The bizarre case this week of the first cyberspace infidelity to have led to a real-life divorce takes some explaining. David and Amy met online in a chatroom, with Amy quickly leaving her marriage to move to Newquay with David before she'd even met him in the flesh. In Cornwall they would sit in their dingy home and play for hours on Second Life, a virtual world where they would pursue glamorous lifestyles through their avatars Dave Barmy and Laura Skye – online alter egos given whatever characteristics gamers choose.
After David and Amy were married in real life four years ago in a low-key ceremony with a few friends at a registry office in St Austell, they immediately rushed home to stage a virtual ceremony where the perfect couple Laura Skye and Dave Barmy cemented their love in front of a few thousand of their best online friends in a lavish ceremony. They hired a wedding planner in Second Life, paying 400 Linden dollars, which is about £5 in real money. "It was really worth every penny," said Amy.
So far, so surreal, but events took a turn for the worse when snake-hipped Mr Barmy began to develop a wandering eye in Second Life. Amy knew there was something wrong by the way David's online alter ego was wearing ridiculously tight trousers ("especially in the groin area") and exposing his manly chest. "A wife just knows these things," she explained. And then her worst fears were confirmed: returning home from buying her hubbie some sweeties, she walked in on Dave Barmy in flagrante with a foxy avatar called Modesty McDonnell.
"I skipped into the bedroom and I suddenly found him at the computer screen, gazing at two naked characters. It was Dave Barmy, and he was having sex with another woman," said Amy. "My head actually started to spin and I thought I was going to be sick. David switched it off, but there was no denying what had been happening.
"I started yelling at him, saying that he had betrayed me. He tried to tell me that it was only a game, but it wasn't a game to me – this was real. Then he admitted that Dave Barmy had paid for an online call girl and that made it even worse. I felt so dirty and so sordid. I ran out of the house, and went to see David's parents. I was crying and in a terrible state, and to begin with I could only blurt out that I had found him cheating on me with an escort girl. Then, when I told them it was all on the internet, they just looked really stunned and confused. His father kept saying: 'So, let me get this straight – he was committing adultery on a computer?' I honestly got the feeling that they thought I was overreacting."
Pollard is now engaged to a 55-year-old Arkansas woman called Linda Brinkley – the real-life gamer behind marriage-wrecker Modesty. "When we first met (online] it was at a fancy dress night on the game and he noticed me across the room and said he felt something special," said the twice-married mother-of-two. "It really was like love at first sight. We've never met in real life but we've got each other's pictures. It's my dream to finally meet up with him and it's all because of the game."
It is easy to look on in bemusement at the sad heirs to the Dungeons & Dragons-playing geeks who first started experimenting with parallel gaming worlds more than 30 years ago. Yet so many people now live their lives in virtual worlds that for many compulsive gamers the lines between what is "real" and "virtual" have become so blurred that they struggle to separate events in cyberspace from their real lives.
That trend is likely to intensify, according to Juan Carlos Pieiro Escoriaza, the director of Second Skin, a film cataloguing cases of chronic internet addiction. "When you look at online games, you are looking at the future of our society," he says. "Over the next five to 10 years you will start to see real and online life merge, to the point where this virtual landscape is going to be so real it will be difficult to tell the difference.
Some people are already there. Indeed, the amount of people living their lives online is remarkable. MapleStory, a popular Korean role-playing virtual world, has 50 million subscribers, as does World Of Warcraft, a Tolkeinesque virtual world. There are more than 15 million Second Life accounts, with other virtual worlds such as Entropia Universe, IMVU, There, Active Worlds, Kaneva and the erotic-oriented Red Light Center each counting their members in the millions.
The time spent by gamers in their parallel existence is phenomenal. In January alone, Second Life gamers spent almost 29 million hours "inworld", with around 38,000 logged on at any one time.
Thanks to the social networking site Facebook, which has overtaken older rivals such as Bebo and MySpace and now has 31 million users, with more joining at the rate of 150,000 a day, living part of our lives in cyberspace is now commonplace. "Building a Facebook profile is one way that individuals can identify themselves, making themselves feel important and accepted," says Philip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. It's a time-consuming business, however: studies have shown that the average British user of social sites spends up to 12 hours a week online, leading more than 70% of companies to ban their use during the working day.
With so many people living their lives online, the potential for the real and virtual worlds to clash with disastrous effect was already becoming apparent before Dave Barmy and Laura Skye's marital spat. The problem, believes psychiatrist Dr Jerald Block, whose report on internet addiction is now a standard text, is that people are "exhausting emotions that they could use in the real world", leaving themselves without the perspective and coping mechanisms – such as empathy and humility – to be able to cope when things go wrong in the real world.
Take the recent arrest of a 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher after she snapped and "murdered" her virtual husband when he "divorced" her suddenly. She now faces charges which could see her fined $5,000 or sentenced to five years in prison.
The two were players in MapleStory, but when the woman was unceremoniously dumped she used a password and ID, which were acquired in happier times, to log on as her former husband and commit virtual suicide, wrecking thousands of hours of work on his character and leading to charges under hacking laws.
The two never met and lived 620 miles apart, but the breakdown of their relationship was too much for the real-life divorcee. "I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," she said.
If there is an element of tragic comedy in that story, there are plenty of tales that suggest the real-life consequences of existing in a virtual world can be profound. In Korea, the most wired-up country on Earth, the concept of cyberviolence is a well-known phenomenon, with more than 200,000 cases recorded last year.
One of the most tragic cases is that of Choi Jin Sil, one of the country's most popular film actresses. The mother of two young children hanged herself from her shower-rail after a cyberspace campaign based on unsubstantiated rumours that she was a loan shark who had caused the suicide of a popular but down-on-his-luck young actor. Bombarded with venom on her networking site, she wrote in her diary that "I am lonely and I am ostracised. I cannot even breathe."
The recent sacking of 13 Virgin Airlines cabin crew for describing customers as "chavs" and claiming that some of the company's 747s were infested with cockroaches on a private Facebook site highlights a growing realisation of the potential dangers of social networking sites nearer to home, yet 34-year-old Emma Forrester had no idea of the danger posed simply by changing her status on Facebook to "single". That was the trigger for a murderous assault by her estranged lorry driver husband Wayne, who broke into her house and killed her with a meat cleaver. Forrester told police he believed his wife was having an affair and felt humiliated that she was now declaring herself available over the internet. "He was angry about an entry she had made on Facebook which he said made him look like a fool," said prosecutor Alex Lewis at the Old Bailey. "She was now advertising her marital status as single."
Nor is that an isolated incident. In May, 41-year-old electrical engineer Gary Grinhaff killed his wife Tracey and then committed suicide when she amended her marital status to "currently splitting" on her Facebook page. Such a public end to what one of the Grinhaffs' friends described as "this perfect family" was too much for Gary.
The only certainty now is that these deaths are unlikely to be the last case where the ethereal world of cyberspace makes a murderous intrusion upon reality.
Only now is the law catching up with the way online life and real life overlap. A Dutch court sentenced two teenagers to 360 hours of community service for virtually beating up a classmate and stealing his digital goods. "These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law], so this is theft," said the judge.
Legislators in Belgium are considering whether their real world laws can cover a case where an avatar was raped by another avatar in Second Life, while the German courts are set to prosecute in cases of "age-play", where people make their avatars look like minors and then make them indulge in sex acts with adult avatars. This has now been disallowed by Linden Labs, the owners of Second Life.
The lines between real and imaginary are already being blurred. Is it already too late to pull the plug?
The full article contains 1840 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
