Monday 14 July 2008

terrorists in world of warcraft

An old article in the wired threat level blog - U.S spies want to find terrorists in world of warcraft.
It's from February this year, but has interesting implications for predictive technologies.

Of course, the major difference between a digital world such as WoW and the real world is that things can be known with more more certainty in the game - because it's running on code that can be interrogated - if there is a a 'code' to the real world, then we're really not close to understanding it. Data about the virtual world is accurate, because it is the same data that IS the the virtual world. Apart from corrupted or misfiled data, it can't be wrong - if the game says that your avatar is in one part of the digital world, that's where it is.

Which is at least one thing to bear in mind when translating any 'lessons' from this to meatspace predictions, or actually - to non-game virtual environments, as they're going to be much messier than the restricted behaviour in ludic environment - games are defined by their rules.

No comments:

Post a Comment