Morpheus is Dead. Morpheus was put to sleep. Morpheus took the death pill. Yes, gaming oriented websites were informing me every hour via my newsreader that this fine man has escaped this mortal coil.

The only problem? Morpheus is just a creation from the minds and pens of the Wachowski brothers. He's currently no more than a character in an online game entitled The Matrix Online. He's not real. So why is it being reported far and wide that he's dead?

Sadly, it appears that the gaming enthusiast press is confusing reality for the gamesphere, or whatever they may want to affectionately call it in the upcoming years. While game journalists have been reporting on massively multiplayer role-playing games for years now, typically they're only concerning items that are instigated by, and hold meaning to those outside and separated from the context of the game. A distributed denial of service attack on Final Fantasy XI is the equivalent of a company under attack, and is of intrisic interest to anyone that cares about SquareEnix, or the state of online games in general.

Morpheus does not carry this weight. Morpheus is a fictional character that now resides in a morgue (or so I presume) in an online game. The only people that care about his existence are the people playing the game, and those at Sega that issued the press release about his death. What's next, Gamespot covering the latest land reports from Second Life? Will I have to pick through my daily gaming news, trying to figure out what articles only pertain to World of Warcraft gamers? Will 1UP end up looking like The Crossing Guardian?

Gaming journalists, please re-evaluate your priorites. You wouldn't report the story of an non-online game as news; there's no reason to give Morpheus the same stature as a real elected official.