Games

Careful What You Do in WoW

The US is preparing a program to detect suspect behavior in any MMO

By Andrei Dumitrescu, Games Editor

25th of February 2008, 19:31 GMT

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There's that guy in World of Warcraft who talks about the impending end. And there are some guys in City of Heroes/City of Villains talking about that plot focused on ending the world. Oh, and there are the shady figures in Tabula Rasa talking about invasion and such.

Where does the game end and where does reality begin? There's a superpower that takes action first and asks questions later. The United States government is thinking about

data-mining MMOs to find and record suspicious behavior by players. A report from the bureau of the Director of National Intelligence mentions, amongst other things designed to stop any terrorist threat aimed at the US, a project called Reynard. Its ultimate aim is "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world".

Not bad for a surveillance project, except for the fact that suspicious actions and behavior in the virtual world are the norm rather than the exception. People do go on-line and do play a MMO as a form of escapism. And escapism means doing weird things, abnormal things within a game, so that you will never have to do them in real life. That betrayal in EVE Online means I am not going to betray my company in real-life. That raid in WoW means I can experience destruction without destroying my neighbors' lawn.

How will Reynard work? It will examine profiles and actions from the players of the selected MMOs for a significant period of time and then it will compile a list of what it considers acceptable and normal behaviors within the selected games. It will then continue to monitor the on-line activities of players and to record those actions that seem to be abnormal or suspicious. Due to the huge amount of data that is to be sorted through, probably no human will have any part in Reynard's decisions.

Based on the profiles the program compiles, intelligence workers will be able to look and see if the suspicious behaviors that exist on-line can be correlated with real world actions for the targeted person. If there's a credible threat, the authorities will then intervene.

Sounds a bit like Big Brother only without all the annoying cameras and with the benefit of beautifully animated game characters, doesn't it? Although Reynard is still in project stage, it's sure to trigger a backlash from gamers and civil rights activists alike.

TAGS:

World of Warcraft | US | CIA | MMOG | Reynard

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