Sigh…

BBC NEWS | Technology | US seeks terrorists in web worlds

The US government has begun a project to develop ways to spot terrorists who are using virtual worlds.

Codenamed Reynard it aims to recognise “normal” behaviour in online worlds and home in on anomalous activity.

It is likely to develop tools and techniques for intelligence officers who are hunting terrorists and terror groups on the net or in virtual worlds.

The project was welcomed by experts tracking terror groups using the net to organise or carry out attacks.

Oh really? I can see it now:

FREEZE! FBI! DROP THE BASTARDSWORD, PUT DOWN THE BELL AND THE BRAND, AND LACE YOUR CLAWS BEHIND YOUR HELMET!

I am even inclined to tenatively cite Lorry’s Confessions of an Arch Wizard website wherein you will find a synopsis of the true experience of the first multi-user games. Some snippets:

I came to Essex MUD quite late. I had looked at it in 1983 to try and get some ideas for MUCK; I worked out how to login (not easy), I worked out how to load the game and… I got killed. I tried again, I got killed again and eventually, when people were bored of killing me, I tried to talk to a wizard about how the game worked and was told to bugger off and then killed again.

This was most people’s initial experience of MUD and although at the time, I got disillusioned and spent the next two years running up a small fortune on my college’s Prestel bill so I could play Shades… I always really wanted to be a MUD player. MUD was “real”, Shades was nice, twee and somehow seemed very false and empty. I like Shades, don’t get me wrong… But it was never a patch on MUD.

In 1986, I tried MUD again. I once more worked out how to login (this time it was a bit easier since I was on the same University Network) and proudly entered the game declaring to the world that I was back.

* Someone tells you “Who cares?”

A finger of death from Rick the Wizard has terminated you.

I re-evaluated my position and realised that perhaps nobody had missed me much in the last three years so I entered the game under a different name and kept my head down. It didn’t work, I was killed within 2 minutes.

[…]

In early MUD history, when the first ever MUD left Essex University in 1986, it was the end of free, public access MUD games anywhere on The Net. We replaced the original MUD game with what was then a pretty poor and unfinished game that ran on the MUD system called MIST but over the years, as MIST was expanded and refined, it became the most violent and wild Multi User Adventure game there has ever, and probably will ever be. I stand by this statement, even in these days of “violent shoot-em-up” games because they are so impersonal and completely lack the personal and psychological aspects of MIST.

The world of online games has changed since the 1980’s – It would not be possible to run a Multi User Game that was as unfair as MIST any more. People would get annoyed at the injustice, and move elsewhere. One thing you really have to bear in mind is that in those days, there was nowhere else to go. Great, isn’t it!

[…]

Not many games seem to have much in the way of irritating features that totally destroy any concepts of fairness, MIST’s pistol was probably fairly unique in this. The theory was that when you got to legend (one level below wizard) you could get the pistol and play Russian Roulette. If the pistol went off, you got half the points needed to get to wizard and if not you died… dead. The only problem was that it never quite got round to giving you the points if you won and so basically it was left to the discretion of wizards or arches. As the wizards lived in fear of giving players too many points (they tended to just get wiped without question) they weren’t often willing to comply. As an added bonus, a legend could be forced by a lower level character to shoot themselves.

This should be reinstated as modus operandi – death and violence. Iit’d give the Feds have something to do, none of this flying-around-on-lizards-being-nice-to-each-other stuff.