Never just a game
MMOs (and some virtual worlds) are games we play together. Games are generally fun, educational, diversionary and sometimes escapist pastimes. Humans are natural gamers. Our tastes and inclinations about games and gaming may differ, but we all play games.
If there's no game we like, we make a game - out of anything and everything. It doesn't matter if it involves traffic lights, paperclips in your office drawer, or trying to outshine the neighbor's garden - we make up our own rules, and play our games, even if nobody else knows.
There's no such thing as "just a game", however, and there's a good reason why.
People. Whether you're playing Chess, or World of Warcraft, you're playing with people, and people extend consequence outside of the parameters of the game.
If you play an hour of Chess with someone in your living room, and near the end, they suddenly upend the board, the chances are you're going to be upset. It's probably not because they're ruining your fun, per se, or spoiling the game (although both these things are probably true), but because they're being ... well, an ass, essentially.
If they then tell you, "It's just a game," do you feel any better about it? Of course not. Just because something is a game, doesn't mean you're not being an unpleasant jerk.
Every player in your MMO and Virtual World is a real person, with real feelings and circumstances, and their own reasons for joining and playing the game. Reasons that aren't necessarily the same as yours - though to be granted there's a certain amount of commonality in general, we're not necessarily always motivated by the same things.
People have memories, and they judge and respond to your actions in a game, much the same as they would anywhere else - in their office, in their living room, at the mall. People remember, and that means there are consequences.
You're likely to tell your friends not to play Chess with the board-tipper. Having heard the details, they're unlikely to want to have much to do with him at all. What about that Minstrel in your Fellowship who cracked lame jokes instead of providing support, while the rest of the Fellowship were defeated? That fellow who rained trash down on your office in Second Life while you were in a business meeting for a deal that would cover your RL mortgage? The girl who ninja-loots the Dark Memories and Memory Loop from Lien the Memorystalker, after a long discussion about looting order. People offering trades that require excessive amounts of travel, and then calling "Gotcha!" when you finally get there - they don't have the item to trade or simply never intended to trade.
At the very least, as the aggrieved party, you've just had your time wasted. Maybe you only get an hour or two per week to spend with your MMO, and someone's just blown your whole week's time with it. You're not going to forget that in a hurry. Nor are the couple dozen other people that it was done to today.
"It's just a game," they laugh. They believe most fervently that you can have come to no harm or inconvenience and that you shouldn't feel bad about it. If you do feel bad, you're an idiot, they think. It's just a game, and they are playing a game within the game.
I've seen a co-worker shred the company tax records "for a laugh" just before an audit; another push a laptop off a desk to get a replacement; A CEO set off the fire-alarm in the company server-room as a prank on his IT staff "just to see the look on their faces" (the fire-systems destroyed the servers and his data, and the shareholders had his head).
You don't need an MMO to be a jerk - you'll still be one in an MMO or out of it. Real people get inconvenienced. Real people suffer losses. As long as real people are involved, it can never be "just a game".
