Peter Ludlow, who many of you will know as a philosopher of language, was spending a fair chunk of his virtual life running a newspaper, The Alphaville Herald that reports on happenings in, you guessed it, Alphaville, a community in The Sims Online.

Recently he reported a case of real-world child abuse that was mentioned by an in game character, and encouraged Maxis (who runs TSO) to report the person involved to the police. (Users can’t do this because they only know players through their handles, not their real names.) After some delay, Maxis did this, though they don’t seem to have been as happy to do so as one might have hoped.

Shortly afterwards the Herald reported that an underage (virtual) brothel was being run in Alphaville. It’s not entirely clear what the legal status of this is, but it’s not obviously not akin to having an underage phone sex service, which clearly is illegal. In any case, Maxis’s response wasn’t to try to shut down the brothel, but to expel Ludlow from the game.

Bringing this all back to me (as I always do on my blog) I knew all about this a couple of days ago, and planned to get around to writing it up as soon as I was done reading job files. (I should add I’m incredibly inefficient at that task – I really hope I get better before my next stint on a search committee. Next task is to find out how good an interviewer I am.) But delay is always a mistake in journalism – I’ve lost my one ever scoop to Salon, who run a reasonable story about what’s happened and why it might matter.