Terrorists are everywhere! Vegan potlucks. Ninja gatherings. And now… geeky online games?
According to the March, 2008 issue of Foreign Policy (FOREIGN POLICY!), “terrorists” in Second Life are a growing concern:
Last year, several bombs were detonated outside the retail stores of American Apparel and Reebok. No one knew who was behind the attacks until the perpetrators came forward—the Second Life Liberation Army. The attack, planned and executed inside Second Life, the popular online virtual world, prompted fears that terrorism from the real world was bleeding into the digital world.
In the case of this terrorist attack, the threat turned out to be purely virtual. In the parlance of online gamers, the group consisted of “griefers,†or those who make life difficult for others. This particular outfit wanted Linden Lab, Second Life’s owners, to grant more rights to “avatars,†or virtual characters.
But the danger of terrorist groups’ lurking in the virtual world is not pure imagination. Interpol, the body responsible for international police cooperation, says that it has detected suspicious activity inside massively multiplayer online role-playing games. “Online games now have their own foreign exchange, which lets players buy and sell different virtual currencies, just as in the real world,†the agency says. “Criminals will undoubtedly take advantage of this.â€
On a serious note, though, I think this is a great example of how that word, “terrorism,” has becoming stretched so thin it has lost all meaning. If “terrorism,” at its base, is about instilling fear through violence for political goals, how could the term possibly apply to a digital world? Can you commit violence against an avatar, a online character that online exists digitally? Can you instill a reasonable fear in the dude in his boxers playing this computer game?
Can aforementioned Dudes in Boxers please weigh in on this? (And others, of course…)