Gamers: MMORPG's to fight terrorism

for any non /.er's out there.... this is sorta neat.

Quote:

---

Can online gaming help defeat Osama bin Laden? That's not as silly a proposition as it may sound.

A Pentagon-sponsored group called the Highlands Forum met recently to discuss what are known as "Massively Multiplayer Online Games." These games, which can allow several million people to play, are among the hottest trends in the Internet world, and they may have some fascinating uses in fighting terrorist networks.

---

As a long time addict to EverCrack, and now, Dark Age of Crack, I got a kick out of that...

DOH, I forgot the link....

here it is.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...2/IN244067.DTL

An interesting read. I'm actually wondering now how many of these MMORPG's are being used as venues for espionage to occur, or even as town-meeting type gatherings for some splinter terrorist cells. Then again, perhaps I'm just getting carried away with the technology. Why use an MMORPG as a meeting place when IRC is infinitely better to maintain a low profile.

As for the simulation angle, I don't see MMORPG's as being too helpful in that area. A supercomputer would be more than capable of creating such a world and populating it with millions of AI characters without breaking a sweat. Military simulations would be much more precise in such an environment rather than broken up over thousands of PCs. And the analogy of al-Quaeda being like an MMORPG in that it is really a highly dispersed network is an interesting theory but nothing more.

I feel much the same way that you do ros, except for one thing.......

Large groups of players in EQ, or Dark age of Camelot, or others, (aka, large guilds) spend tons of time talking about attacks, or raids, whatever you want to call them. This kind of conversation could easily be subverted to discuss actuall attacks or transfers, or something.

There are so many ways that I can see, just as a player of these MMORPG's.

I do think it is a bit far fetched though.

IchNiSan