Be wary of who you laugh at while shamelessly ganking in World of WarCraft - they could turn out to be a real-life terrorist.
Apparently, you see, the US intelligence community is looking to develop code that'll investigate suspicious goings on in online virtual worlds. The overall scheme is dubbed Reynard, according to a publicly available document.
Reported on Wired, the document explains that Reynard is "a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the intelligence community".
It continues, "The cultural and behavioural norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify 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".
If terrorism weren't such a horribly serious issue, we'd laugh until our boots of +5 strength fell off.
Courtesy ofCVG.
Feb 25, 2008
