[Online Gaming] - polygon sword of doom!

MMOG:s offers something quite unique to it’s players in comparison to other genres. It offers immersion, the chance to escape into another reality which in many cases can seem more compelling than the real thing. Some people can handle this attraction with care but others drown and spend more time of their life in the virtual universe than in the physical one. This is something people must learn to understand when cases like the following just keeps on appearing.

Legend of Mir 2 is a MMOG set in an oriental fantasy setting. The game is mostly popular in China and South Korea but has in some cases even found it’s way into American/European hearts. In some cases the playing has sadly taken tragic turns though. In 2005 the chinese LoM2-player Qui Chengwei was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing his friend Zhu Caoyuan to death. As it plays out Qui had found a really valuable and powerful sword named “the Sable of the Dragon” in the game. For some reason he loaned the sword to his fellow player Zhu. When Zhu realised how valuable the sword was he sold it for £480 online and ran. Qui was furious. He contacted the police (the real one) and reported the theft of his virtual sword but they wouldn’t understand. Qui then decided to take matters in his own hands and went to Zhu’s home and took his life.

Is £480 worth it to kill another man? Ofcourse that money translates to a lot more in China but as scrupleless some people are, I think there is something more behind. As I said before, MMOG worlds can for some people be more preferable than the real world, in some cases it becomes the true world. The world where your friends are, your family hangs out and your life revolves around. Who are others to say it’s wrong? People devote their whole lives to sports. Equally “wrong” in my opinion. Still, as any activity are a springboard to violence and intense feelings when the interest is taken far enough. A lot of discussions around videogames are about violence and how games affect peoples likelyhood of going on a killing spree after playing them. I don’t believe violence in videogames is a major trigger for this. What I do believe is that games, and certainly MMOG:s, while so immersive that you choose to spend a large portion of your life playing them, also offers a place where people can ruin other peoples life and get away with it. Strong statement but the fact that most MMOG:s somewhat lack regulations, laws or restrictions of what you can and can’t do leaves some people defenceless. I am not saying games should be changed to conform to any law. Neither am I saying people should be restricted to play only a set mount of time. All I’m saying is that games sometimes are more than games and should be taken seriously. If people don’t stop ignoring some games for what they are, cases like Chui’s are going to be a lot more frequent.

[Online Gaming] - Scammers paradise

Eve Online is a MMO set in space. Every player controlls his own avatar and is able to buy different ships, everything from small shuttles to enormous planetsized starships, join a corporation, which is the term for player made teams, engineer, manufactor or collect raw materials for new products, or hunt spacepirates alternatively becoming one themselves. The game has probably one of the largest areas in the MMO-genre, spanning over a whole galaxy including countless starsystems. The space is indeed needed though, since all players reside on the on the same server or shard. Eve now holds the record for number of concurrent online players with over 30.000 individuals at the same time. The game is almost solely controlled by the players and the company behind the game, CCP, seldom interfers the gameplay. Borders between factions constantly moves between factions and war between corporations is fought daily. Optimizing of traderoutes have made entire starsystems obsolete, all by the hands of players and the player controlled economic system. This truely makes Eve a social experiment of enormous magnitude. Since CCP don’t meddle in players business, everything can happen, and happens. But when has the freedom become too great? Can it ever become too great? An example where a LOT of people really got mad at CCP for NOT meddling was the following.

In early 2006 a avatar named Cally announced the opening of the first intergalactical bank in Eve. The bank named Eve Intergalactic Bank promised favourable rates and a plenty of tied-in services like checking balances online, trading stocks and serious newsletters. The bank slowly grew and large investors chose to deposit their corporations saved up money in it. Months passed and rumours began spreading that the bank was a scam. At about that time in late august, Cally (or the player behind Cally) decided enough was enough and cleared the bank containing 700 billion ISK (the currency in Eve). The value in real money has been estimated around 180.000 U.S. dollars. Needless to say, a lot of people who were affected complained to CCP but they just shrugged. Nothing in the EULA said anything about this kind of scam and it was acording to them, perfectly legal.

CCP has during the game’s whole life encouraged this type of inventive scams and trickery in the game. It can be argued that it adds a new layer to the game but how far can you take it? In this example a lot of peoples paid for gaming time, collecting resources was stolen. Half a years work generating $180.000. When should you start proctecting people from this? When the bounty exceeds 1 million dollars? When someone takes his own or someone elses life? Virtually none of these MMOGs have any laws or regulations against these sorts of scams and their absence is clear in the EULA. Yet people are equally surprised each time something like this happens. In this example noones actual living is stolen but some people play these games allmost like a second job, investing several hours a day in the world. For these people, this scam was allmost as hard a blow as if actual money were stolen. Should these people be protected? Ofcourse individual games and cases must be judged seperatly but in this case I don’t think so. In the end it is still a game, and at that one that thrives on the possibilities of creating your own gaming experience. With rules against these sort of possibilities the game would be a lot less appealing. Different gaming companies act differently in these issues. While CCP is extremely liberal, Blizzard – creater of World of Warcraft, is equally harsh with their rules. Had this occured in WoW, I am completely convinced that Blizzard would have acted by banning the scammers account. Who is right?

[Online Gaming]

Online gaming is growing at an enormous rate. As technology advances, larger, more realistic and more immersive games are created that spawns equally large communities devoted to the games. At the frontier are the MMO-games (Massive Multiplayer Online games), games where thousands of people play together in huge virtual worlds. Social gameplay is one of the cornerstones and a big provider for all the ethical issues present in the still young genre. The problems are inevitable when you look at the premises but hard to predict. These worlds are often microuniverses with cultural clashes between people from all over the world, gathered in a space not larger than Manhattan. On the following posts I will pick examples from some of the games in the MMO-genre, describing ethical dilemmas that heralds problems to come...

[Integrity]-I spy...Warcraft spy

Spyware is everywhere and as the net has grown, we have learned to be cautious to the point of paranoia against anything that might be a distributor of these malicious software, anything from e-mails to free or paid software. But how cautious do you need to be to be totally safe? What happens when corporations you trust, corporations overflowing with goodwill break all their trust and decides to go behind customers backs, planting spyware without notice? Thomas has allready written in his blog about the rootkit hidden in Sony’s copyprotected records. This time I write about the game company Blizzard.

With every game a bestseller and truckloads of fans, the company has plenty of goodwill to spend. In late 2005 Greg Hoglund, an engineer and Blizzard fan, discovered a spyware hidden in Blizzards latest success World of Warcraft. The spyware checked every program Hoglund had opened while running the game, it checked e-mail adresses of people on MSN, titles of word documents, even minimized applications, everything. Blizzard allready had it covered from a legal point of view though, as a small fine print in the EULA. Hoglund started to blog about his discoveries and the news (noone had apparently read and understood the EULA) soon reached the official forums of the game. The reactions wasn’t however what you’d expect. After some displeased grunting and a promise from Blizzard to not use the information for anything that would violate privacy, the players accepted the intrusion. At the time World of Warcraft had around 4,5 million users. Today that number exceeds 8,5 million. Have people gone numb and ignorant? Apparently peoples trust in some companys are limitless. Blizzard stated that the reason they employed the spyware was to make sure noone cheated in the game. Wouldn’t it then be easy to limit the spyware’s search area around executable files?

Nevermind the good will of the company or their original intended purpose for the spyware. In every case where spyware is used, the information gathered could be used in a way that we do not approve of. To trust blindly in a company and never question their methods can in my opinion never be a good thing.

As a funny sidenote, people have now found a way to work around Blizzard’s spyware och run cheating programs undetected. The hackers ironically used Sony’s infamous spyware/rootkit in order to mask their programs. The procedure is simple, just put your files in the right folder and add $sys$ to the filename. The trick is on you Blizzard!

[Integrity]-Darknet vs Lightnet

One of the great things about the internet is the possibility to act anonymously to a greater extent than in real life. This has made life a lot easier for people engage in activities ranging from political discussions to filesharing and has provided safehouse for people with differing opinions. This has changed a lot through the years though and as it is now, several nations in europe are introducing laws and regulations heavily jeopardizing the integrity of it’s citizens. Goverments are given full authority to gather and collect information of each everyones habits on the net. Companies are given the right to persecute people and violate their integrity for the sole sake of profit. Sweden is no exception to this. The human rights-group “Privacy International” has published a report on how well europe’s nations are handling peoples integrity each year since 1997. On the latest index of 2006, Sweden was left almost last on the list, only second to Brittain when it comes to violating peoples privacy. As a citizen of Sweden I had no idea things were this bad mostly because we are kept in the dark when it comes to these changes. Our politicians try to tone down every new law contributing to the big brother society we are clearly heading towards.

Slowly people are realizing this though, and countermeasures have been taken. As the open internet slowly turns into a censored, surveiled proporty, more and more people are turning to darknets. The traditional definition of a darknet is an isolated community of people trusting each other, closed to everyone else. Anonymity is maintained by keeping unwelcomed people out rendering surveillance impossible. Several different software tools that help setting up and using such a community are available freely in the internet. Most software can only handle small groups of people but some software, like Freenet is said to support millions of users.

On a larger scale, services are popping up that allows for anonymously switching IP. This enables users to have total anonymity independent of ISP. Some people say that this is a perfectly good solution in order to reestablish users integrity on the internet. The problem with these anonymous darknets is that they work indiscriminatly. Terrorists, rapists, pedophiles aswell as filesharers and political activists all hide under the same umbrella with no distinction between them from the outside. On the open internet, “lightnet” if you will, heavier criminals such as terrorists and sexual predators could still be traced. I believe the lobby organisations representing record companys and the movies industry are largely to blame for this devlopment. With so many filesharers scared to be persecuted the development of darknet services are inevitably driven forward. In many ways it is a choice between security and privacy. On one hand we have a big brother society monitoring our every move, on the other, a lawless darknet where criminals do as they please. At this time I see no middle path. As more people will understand the extent of the privacy invasion currently being performed, whether it is a lobbyorganisation looking for filesharers, a marketing company logging your behavior or a goverment looking for unwanted opinions, they will consider darknets as a viable option.

Privacy is a precious thing and as long as darknets are our only option, I am totally for it. Question is what it will take for our goverment to fully understand darknets potential. Are they really ready to lose what little controll they still have left?

Tor - online anonymity
Privacy International
Relakks - ip-switcher
Freenet - online anonymity

[Digital Resistance]-Internet, the grey zone

When I first started to write about digital resistance through websites I mixed up digital resistance with ethics. Instead of thinking about what this technology means for the people that uses it to protest, I started to debate with myself wheter or not the medium in itself was ethically viable. I realize I made the same mistake with the post about Floodnet. That debate is going nowhere. Ethics have nothing to do specificly with internet webpages. Just as any medium, be it books, movies, posters or games, it may contain questionable content. But content is protected under the freedom of speech and rightfully so. The question is not what ethics have to do with the web but rather how the web has affected the way we spread and recieve ethically charged content. That is a question I am much more comfortable with.

I feel amazed every day at what a beast the internet has become. News become history in a matter of seconds, we are forced to devour information in such a ridiculous speed it is a wonder anything sticks at all. I think this flow is what define internet as a united medium best, no matter if we’re dealing with filesharing or a passive webpage about digital resistance. It has made so many things possible it’s hard to even begin thinking about it. Still, a digital resistance movement close to me, since I was there from the beginning and saw it happen, would have to be the rise of Sweden´s Pirate Party. Their organisation wouldn’t be possible without the internet. Everything happened in a matter of hours, days. The first 6 hours the project was announced, their site had over 75.000 hits. They now have close to 9.000 members in their fold and an infrastructure allmost exclusively based around the internet.

But the information flow can be both a good and a bad thing. While news travel fast on the internet I believe we aren’t as fast to filter it. I think we are drowning in information and it’s getting harder to find the right one. I read Sofies blog yesterday and she pointed out something something absurd but true. We have too much information to form any clear opinion. We seldom encounter anything anymore that is clearly “good” or “evil”. A loving single father can still be a murderer, bankrupting a “evil” company will leave thousands innocent people unemployed, which is better, improving eldercare or daycare? These are issues that the internet, with it’s flow of information, is extremely good at enlighting and it states a problem with resistance based content on websites: which is one to believe?

While there is no doubt the internet with it’s speed and sheer amount of information is ideal to spread a message and form a community around, I think increasingly less people are willing to choose any one side with all the grey zones present.

[Digital Resistance]-Zapatista Floodnet

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