The boy has been sentenced to 8 years in prison and ordered to pay the victim and his family a restitution of 760,000 RMB (approximately $103,140 USD).

In light of the recent "Mortal Kombat killings," we're hesitant to believe the claims of any youth who says they have been influenced by a video game into violence. In this case, though, we believe him simply because China lacks our American legal system that allows people to claim "games made me do it," and subsequently shift all blame to the game's creators.

While this crime is both shocking and bizarre, we have to applaud the Chinese officials for offering a sane punishment as response. Had this occurred here in the United States, the blame would have landed squarely on Blizzard, and a multi-million dollar lawsuit followed by a governmental inquiry into the evils of World of Warcraft (possibly helmed by Tipper Gore) wouldn't be at all surprising.

1) The Assassination of Lord British - Ultima Online - August 8, 1997

Lord British was killed during an in-game appearance on Ultima Online’s beta test on August 8, 1997. A royal visit was conducted as a part of server population stress test. A player character known as Rainz cast a spell called “fire field” on Lord British that, surprisingly, killed him. According to Starr Long, the whole thing was just a human error: Lord British’s character, like others, had been made invulnerable, but by design the invulnerability did not persist over several game sessions. Shortly before the incident, the server had crashed, and Richard Garriott had forgotten to set his invulnerability flag on when logging on again. Shortly afterwards, Rainz’s account was banned from the beta test for previously exploiting bugs rather than reporting them (infamously used by his character Aquaman to kill many player characters, a purported griefing incident). According to Origin, he was not banned for the assassination but rather for previous complaints against his account that were brought to light as a result of this attention.The massive amount of lag, caused by the stress test, was a factor in Lord British’s