THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The amulet and mask were a 13-year-old’s virtual possessions in an online game. In the real world, he was threatened with a knife to give them up.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the theft conviction of a youth who stole another boy’s possessions in the popular online fantasy game RuneScape. Judges ordered the offender to perform 144 hours of community service.

Only a handful of such cases have been heard worldwide, and they’ve reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods” – and whether stealing them is real-world theft.

The suspect’s lawyer had argued the amulet and mask “were neither tangible nor material and unlike, for example, electricity, had no economic value.”

But the Netherlands’ highest court said the virtual objects had an intrinsic value to the 13-year-old gamer because of “the time and energy he invested” in winning them.

The court said that the 15-year-old offender and another youth beat and kicked the boy and threatened him with a knife until he logged into RuneScape and dropped the objects in 2007.

Both of the thieves were convicted by a lower court in 2009, but only one of them had appealed to the Supreme Court.