Simulating terror? You’re soaking in it!
by Alphaville Herald on 04/03/05 at 8:46 pm
In a very interesting recent post on Terra Nova entitled Simulating terror, Ren Reynolds digs up the following gem from an interview with Will Wright last September.
We’ve been talking to people in homeland security that want to know if we could simulate a terrorist network. I keep telling them they don’t have to; they just need to come study the griefers in a multi-player game, because they are exactly that. They always figure out how to get by every little loophole, they hide in the cracks, they respond very fast to whatever new policies you put in place. It is like the perfect simulator for a terrorist organization. So the answer is yes, unfortunately.
The bearded ones on Terra Nova have been busy pointing out differences but missing the point I think.
The point is not that there is something in common about the goals or the motives or the moral worth of ther respective groups. Rather I think that Will’s point is that there is a common meta-strategy to the way both terrorists operate and griefers and gangs operate in MMOs. All of the above exploit loopholes in the rules, finding unanticipated ways to do damage to the system. All of the above operate with multiple alts and with groups with fuzzy boundaries and shifting memberships. They represent soft targets with the ability to swarm and attack hard targets like building and game servers.
Cy hits up One Song’s club during the Second Jessie War.
A TechSol engineer celebrates the crashing of the Baku simulator/server.
cow_2001
Mar 7th, 2005
A terrorist doesn’t look like this.
When you’re doing whatever you do in a street someone that you’ve thought seconds earlier is just doing what every other person on that street does – living his life – shouts “Allah Uwa Uqbar Orbis Tertius!” or something like that then:
1. Pulls some sort of a submachine gun if it’s winter and he can wear a long coat, usually dies after a few minutes from the gunshots of a guard, policeman or a soldier.
2. Push a button, his body is destroyed instantly and a few others “lucky” enough to be around him on that moment, the others who’re farther get blasted off and dies after a few hours until days maybe from little metal bits that suibomb had in his charge, maybe they just die from the blast that has crashed their inner organs such as brain liver etc, and then there are the survivors, maybe they’ll live the rest of their lives just like everybody else but they usually go to rehability, some never go out. brain damage, nerve damage maybe one of those metal bits got a hold of one of their kidneys.
No self respecting REAL suicide terrorist will EVER wear his TERRORIST UNIFORM in the public he wants to BLAST OFF INTO OBLIVION.