GenieKnows Games Narrowing the field

Wired has written an article about cyber terrorism in the World of Warcraft and how it might be useful to study for real world counter-terrorist operations. At first I thought Wired must have published their April Fool’s article early. The first two paragraphs are just so over the top and farfetched that I couldn’t believe what I was reading,

Virtual terrorists blowing themselves up and spreading disease inside World of Warcraft could provide counterterrorists with a window into real-world plots.

Such activities in the massively multiplayer online game bear an eerie resemblance to actual terrorism, and analyzing terror tactics in Warcraft could prove more enlightening than current computer simulations used by counter terrorists.

Virtual terrorists? I mean really Wired, virtual terrorists in the World of Warcraft? A “virtual terrorist” as Wired puts it, is a player in the World of Warcraft who exploits a game mechanic in order to cause a large amount of deaths in the game world. Over two years ago, a player could teleport to a populated city area and spread a disease called Corrupted Blood which would deal massive amounts of damage, effectively killing everyone in the vicinity of the player – an exploit that has long since been patched. Next time you try and rack up the kill count in the World of Warcraft, I would think twice unless you want to be pegged as a virtual terrorist.

What is interesting to note about this article is that Wired completely discredits the concept of a “virtual terrorist” in the World of Warcraft by interviewing a supposed “virtual bioterrorist”,

Virtual bioterrorist Allen and his guild, domus fulminata, used a similar teleportation technique to spread an epidemic throughout in-game cities. Using a contagious curse called Corrupted Blood that could kill most players in seconds, Allen and his guild purposely infected other players and created a semi-permanent well of disease in cities' non-player characters. Allen and his group found the chaos caused by their actions humorous.

"It's just funny to watch people run away screaming," he said.

Now I’m no counter-terrorism expert but I’m going to take a guess that the motivation and behavioural patterns will differ between a kid who exploits game mechanics and an actual terrorist. “Virtual Terrorism” is nothing more than bored kids exploiting mechanics.There are no consequences to exploiting and there is no penalty to be at the receiving end of a death other than a small inconvenience in time.

A digg user by the name of Loornadune posted a comment to the Wired article saying why it doesn’t make sense to label him a “virtual terrorist”,

This is just foolish. I can understand using a game to experiment with psychological stuff, and MAYBE even economic stuff, but this is just dumb. I've exploited corrupted Blood too, does that make me a f%^&*!g terrorist? No, I'm a teenager that has too much free time, and is playing this game that developers let me play. You don't even gain anything out of doing this, much like kiting dragons into capitol cities in WoW, so I don't really get how terrorism is linked to that, because there's usually a motive (Insanity, religious oppression, etc.) linked to terrorist attacks.