Great post at Chewing Pixels, My Virtual Sins: A Gamer’s Confession:

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been longer than I can remember since my last confession. These are my sins:

I killed a man. No, too modest. On every continent and in all countries, across centuries, worlds and dimensions, in times of war and times of peace, my trail of dead is one frag short of endless.

I masterminded the genocide of countless Civilizations and annihilated every city on Earth each time I booted up Defcon.

I’ve committed patricide in Lego Star Wars, matricide in Final Fantasy VII, sororicide in Bioshock (little sister had it coming) and pesticide in Viva Piñata.

I colonised America in Anno 1701 and killed all of the Indians (but hey, if it works in my favour, I did help put an end to World War II around 73 million times).

I blew up a sheep in Worms. Come to think of it, I blew up a worm in Worms. I wiped out all of the ants in EDF2017, all of the bats in Symphony of the Night, all of the mice in Chu Chu Rocket and all of the light in The Darkness.

My Nintendog ran away.

I vandalised Shinjuku in Jet Set Radio, jaywalked in Frogger, tore down the Empire State Building in Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and, last week, I rolled up London in a Katamari. I’ve let Sim Cities run to ruin and left the weeds to choke town Animal Crossing. I couldn’t be bothered to tidy up Tetris.

Read the rest here.

Aside from being a fascinating graphic from K-Zero, it’s a sobering and exciting thought that over 300m people are now registered as users of virtual worlds. That’s the equivalent to the third-most populous country on Earth, the United States of America.

The list is not complete (it excludes 10m+ World of Wankcraft players, for example) but gives some idea of how many people are exploring these new online spaces. If I’m reading the chart right it’s the under-20s who comprise the bulk of these, and I suspect that more of these are active users than, say, in Second Life. Demographically that suggests a new generation of native users …

(h/t Metaverse Journal)

Benjamin Duranske at Virtually Blind flags up a paper by Bart Schermer, partner in consultancy firm Considerati and an assistant professor at the University of Leiden (Faculty of Law) in the Netherlands, Alan Turing and the Matrix: Intelligent Systems for Law Enforcement in Virtual Worlds [.pdf]. It’s a thought-provoking short article, and I’m just going to pull out a few items of particular interest.

Due to the popularity of the MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online roleplaying games] and virtual worlds, where millions of people now interact on a daily basis, their relevance is becoming ever greater within our society. This relevance is heightened by the fact that virtual worlds are not isolated from the real world. While it is possible to view the ‘virtual world’ and the ‘physical world’ (i.e., the real world) as two distinct environments, they interact to a large extent. As such the boundaries of the physical world and the virtual world become blurred. The area where the virtual world touches upon the real world can best be described as ‘interreality’ (Kokswijk, 2003). A good example of this phenomenon is people willing to pay real money for virtual goods. Interreality raises all sorts of interesting possibilities for social interaction and economic activities, however it can also lead to various forms of deviant behavior.

I like the term ‘interreality’. It lends itself well to describing the fuzzy cognitive interface between the Real and the Virtual. It does slightly mask the fact that this is a contingent relationship - the Virtual currently cannot exist without the Real.

The notion of crime is somewhat difficult in MMORPGs and virtual worlds. First of all, defining certain types of behavior in virtual worlds as deviant implies almost by definition regulation of the virtual environment by a central authority … the rules of social conduct within virtual worlds may differ from those in the real world. Thus, functional equivalence of the rules of criminal law in MMORPGs and virtual worlds is not a given.

This is an excellent point, although one far too subtle for most law enforcement agencies to grasp. Their understanding of normative behaviour is likely to be grounded purely in the Real. In a sense, this is correct - why bother with a Virtual infringement if it has no effect in the Real?

Schermer identifies three types of ‘deviant’ behavior - cheating (often endemic and desirable in MMORPG gameplay); virtual crime (theft of virtual goods with Real world value, as in gold farming and captcha solving, slander, defamation, identity fraud, stimulative paedophilia simulation). The third type Schermer defines is that of ‘preparatory actions’:

[The] Internet has contributed greatly to the communication capabilities of organized crime and international terrorism. Through websites, email, internet relay chat (IRC), and instant messaging programs (AOL IM, MSN), criminals and terrorists can communicate effectively and in relative safety. However, criminals are also aware of the fact that their modes of electronic communication can be monitored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Therefore, they may turn to less conspicuous forms of communication such as interacting with one another in MMORPGs or virtual worlds.

Note the qualification ‘may’. The present consensus is that terrorist use of virtual worlds is minimal, although this is likely to change. Contrast considered research with the breathless reporting of last summer, in which The Australian and its News Corporation sister The Times of London claimed that “the dismantling and disruption of military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan after September 11 forced terrorists to turn to the virtual world.” This notion of ‘virtual sanctuary’ is riddled with conceptual errors as it is, and the facts do not support even the basic premise of these stories.

But, as Schermer says:

It is likely that with the increasing popularity of virtual worlds, virtual crime will become a more serious problem over time. Therefore, at some point in time law enforcement in virtual worlds may become necessary. When it comes to the policing of cyberspace, surveillance plays an important role. For the context of this article, three levels of surveillance play a particular role, viz. 1) surveillance at the IP level, 2) surveillance at the application level, and 3) surveillance at the interaction level.

I agree with this, and Schermer suggests three ways that software agents might undertake surveillance in lieu of human agents. Unobtrusive agents are disembodied elements of the invisible surveillance infrastructure. Avatars could simulate real-life police officers, and would be visible and accessible in-world, much like the ‘bobby-on-the-beat’ model of traditional policing. The third option is undercover agents, posing as normal avatars, and interacting socially with other residents or players. These would not be immediately recognisable as surveillance operatives, as they would pass the Turing test by demonstrating plausible intelligence. They would also be subject to the same risks as real-life agents engaged in surveillance, entrapment and infiltration operations.

Schermer suggests the following legal ramifications:

When we examine the use of software agents for surveillance on the interaction level, it is my opinion we must distinguish between software agents that merely ‘patrol’ cyberspace, and software agents that interact more directly with inhabitants of virtual worlds. For the most part, I feel that the first type of surveillance is part of the normal police task and that as such new rules are not necessary. When software agents actually start interacting with inhabitants of the virtual world, new rules will likely be necessary. The reason for this is that, in general, these agents will be more intelligent and will operate within the personal sphere of the player, where they could form a greater threat to privacy and liberty.

My immediate thought is: within whose jurisdiction does it fall to uphold rights to privacy and liberty? I’d like to think that recent initiatives like Project Reynard will consider the legal implications of policing cyberspace. Does international rights legislation apply? If the internet is non-locative physical space, as I’m beginning to think it should be considered, how do we determine jurisdiction? Through consideration of nationality of actors? ISP location? Location of intended acts? Location of virtual acts - game servers? The virtual world Tribal Net (out in beta this week) uses a distributed network of user-owned PC-based servers - another innovation likely to fox current legal frameworks.

These issues are not going to go away.

This is one of the better articles I’ve read about gold farming:

Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. They acquire (”farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.

They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

This is a well-established practice in China, as well as the Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere, and is another example of how people are earning real money through the use of virtual worlds. And lest anyone think that the real life effects are negligible or insignificant, people have been murdered in disputes over virtual gaming assets.

So (allegedly) went the chant at the Highbury Library a few years back. Abu Muqawama drew attention to this tongue-in-cheek article about bin Laden’s love for Arsenal in the Telegraph archives from 2001. This rang some bells.

Jason Burke wrote in Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam:

Nor, as some have claimed [i.e. Adam Robinson, cited in the Telegraph article], is there any evidence that bin Laden is a fan of north London’s Arsenal Football Club and personally ordered the assassination of David Beckham, the English soccer star.

He adds that “bin Laden does not have a small or deformed penis” either. Bin Laden is unlikely to have ever visited the U.K., let alone been to see the Gooners. I do remember a more reputable source than Robinson (Gilles Kepel? Olivier Roy?) suggesting that bin Laden was swayed by the self-organising power of football crowds, but this was more likely to have been in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, one would think.

Faisal Devji, in Landscapes of the Jihad, writes:

… the event itself is compared to a soccer match, which is to say a game, a televised spectacle, and not to some unmediated form of reality. As it turns out, comparing the attacks of 9/11 to televised football games, or to karate tournaments, is common in Al-Qaeda circles. This suggests that its jihad is conceived of in sporting rather than, say, apocalyptic terms, as a rule-bound contest in which survival and indeed community of both parties is assumed. Perhaps such comparisons indicate callousness, or even a loss of reality in their makers. They certainly do represent acts of the jihad as performances which are ethical because they are self-contained.

He goes on to relate the story of a colleague of bin Laden’s in whose dream his fellow jihadis were playing soccer against the Americans, but in which his team turned into pilots, the very same pilots who manned the planes on 9/11. ‘Terrorism as theatre’ is a well-trodden analytical course, but the relationship between the jihad and football, both agents of globalisation, is an interesting one.

Bin Laden has of course been banned by the Arsenal. Anyway, I have evidence that BL is a scouser of the red persuasion, so the whole argument is null and void:

Although, come to think of it, this photo reminds me of an acquaintance of mine who used to head off down to Highbury dressed as a rabbi and sit in the Clock End…

Censorship in Troy, New York: an interview with Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal by Clare Hurley on the World Socialist Web Site. It’s an interesting example of the crossover between war and gaming, the real and the virtual, and the perils of censorship:

An exhibition of Iraqi-born performance artist Wafaa Bilal’s most recent art piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored last month when Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, “suspended” it. The suspension came in response to protests mounted by the College Republican club and spearheaded by a local politician, Troy Public Works Commissioner Robert Mirch.

Protesters, many of whom admitted they had not actually seen “Virtual Jihadi,” claimed the video piece was an incitement to terrorism. Officials at RPI, a private research institute dedicated to developing technology, made no effort to defend Bilal, an artist-in-residence at the Institute.

The intention of the video piece is to show the effects of the US occupation on ordinary Iraqis. Hacking the code of a real video game, Bilal creates a fictional version in which he inserts himself as a suicide bomber on a quest to assassinate US president George W. Bush after his brother is killed by US occupation forces.

“This artwork is meant to bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians, to the travesties of the current war, and to expose racist generalizations and profiling,” Bilal explains on his website. “Similar games such as ‘Quest for Saddam’ or ‘America’s Army’ promote stereotypical, singular perspectives. My artwork inverts these assumptions, and ultimately demonstrates the vulnerability to recruitment by violent groups like Al Qaeda because of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.”

Read the rest of the article and interview here. Further interviews are here.