Twins are found in SunnyBank Hills in Brisbane. A boy and a girl, seventeen months old,. They weigh just 4.72kg and 4.97kg, respectively.
A two-year-old girl is taken to hospital. She can’t walk, talk and can barely crawl. She weighs just 5.8 kilos and authorities suspect that she has never been taken out of her apartment in the U.S. state of Oklahoma.
Rushed to hospital.
Starved, neglected.
A three-month-old girl is left alone in her home for up to twelve hours a day, fed just once a day. She dies in South Korea of severe dehydration.
What do these three cases from such far-flung corners of the globe have in common?
Their parents were all addicted to playing the online game, Second Life.
Second Life is an Internet fantasy world, where you can reinvent yourself, and indulge in the kind of life you’ve only dreamed of.
It started in 2002 and has gained such a following that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opened campaign offices in this parallel universe. There are over 36 million registered users of the game.
Second Life users describe it as liberating, allowing them to shrug off the responsibilities of every day life and escape. They inhabit a world without boundaries, where they can do what they want, travel where they want, be who they want and have sex with whomever they want.
At one point every major media organisation and company had an office in Second Life.