Hell, look at me: I'm a real world nutcase who's a nuise gai in EVE, just a moron and terrible PvPer. ;-)

As for Mittens, well, he's a lawyer. At least insofar as civil law is concerned, their whole profession revolves around legitimizing and "gaming the system" to effectively grief people.
EVE, indeed, is real, it seems. ;-)

Personally I would consider the Japanese scenario to be more that the "straight-laced rigid exterior" is more of a facade, albeit carefully maintained, but still a facade, over the "true" selves.
I have a dear friend from HS days who just came back from spending 6 yrs in Japan teaching Engrish. She said that over there, alcohol is consumed in astounding quantities, ostensibly just to "let go" of the rigid facade -- it's such an ingrained thing for them. And, here's the interesting part, corollary to the "EVE is just a 'release'" idea: what happens when you're drunk there, stays at when you were drunk.
Interesting when you compare it to Western culture, where "what happens when you're drunk goes on Facebook and everyone lulz or raeg!es at you about it."

Psychopathic in-game behaviour as a way for people to let off steam sounds like a better explanation than pretending there are no connections between in-game behaviour and real life behaviour.

There are grey areas to almost every moral decission. Its those grey areas where we get ourselves into trouble, where we justify our actions and convince ourselves that those actions are morally defensible. In game, we can play whatever character we please, then log off and continue playing the character we choose in RL.

But those damned grey areas keep poping up. In this particular case, there was a character who was perpetrating a scam that bled into RL and a victim whose in game decission affected his RL bank account.

Stay clear of those grey areas and you can play any character you want. Cross that line, though, and your in game character starts to look a lot like your RL character.