Reflections From The Pond

It has a flashy title, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with a .gov adress so it must be official, and it has spent a lot of RL gold (I guess) to produce a 15-page summary report on data mining.

The report outlines a few up-and-coming projects, but what I think will catch most gamers’ eyes are the Reynard Project, “a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games”.

The data mining is defined as “a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases” in order to ” discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist and criminal activity…”

Terrorists in WoW?

Of course there are, let me introduce to you mr Ganker and his friend mr Scammer. But I guess you have already encountered them several times, in various guises.

You know any other place where it is totally legit to harass and grief other people? Didn’t think so. Yeye, QQ more nuub, or whatever that kind of people say.

The relative anonymity and the lack of any real consequences really bring out the worst in so many people it seems, patterns of suspicious criminal and terrorist behaviour must be emerging all over the place.

I think the Reynard project would have had an easier time tracking decent, friendly and unselfish behavior in online games. Although it do exists, there really are a lot nice and kind people out there too, and I am really glad every time I meet one :-)

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