The Reynard project will study and
profile the gaming habits of online level 10 doom wizards, mountain
dwarves and barbarians the world over in an attempt to detect
dangerous extremists who have infiltrated the game.
The aim of the project is to detect "suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." It is believed that MMOs have become recruitment sites for potential terrorists. The project was recently approved by the guardians of all things good in the world, the US congress.
The project's brief states that, “The cultural
and behavioural norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally
unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging
social, behavioural and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming
environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to
determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious
behaviour and actions in the virtual world.”
That's all well and good, but they could have saved themselves a lot
of time and money if they'd checked out this episode of South Park first.
Make Love, Not Warcraft
