Warcraft For Fun, Profit, and National Security [video games]
Long ago, I agreed to be the online gaming geek of this crowd, so I have two interesting WoW items for you this lazy Saturday afternoon — before TN whips up on Memphis (the only city in the United States that can fairly be called Detroit Aspirational):
If you are tired of playing WoW for hours and hours building your character, there’s hope for you! No, it’s not quitting and exposing yourself to the great outdoors. It’s paying someone to play for you.
No longer do you have to endure actually playing the game yourself. Instead, you can have one of several character building services Power Level your character while you sleep, go to class, or go to work. For a fee, of course. Most of these services are clearinghouses that contract with other players (paying them about 10% of the total fee for the service) to play your character while you are away. When you log back on, your character will have advanced as much as you are willing to pay for, without the silly hassle of having to play the game yourself. It costs roughly $300-320 to level your character to the max (level 70). That way you can play the game after the game is already over and just walk around feeling like a badass.
Y brought this to my attention. WIRED magazine reports that the U.S. government, having stamped out all real-world terrorism, has now turned to routing out terrorists suspected to have infiltrated — you guessed it — World Of Warcraft. The Department of Homeland Security will begin this project by implementing data mining techniques to profile “normal” gaming behavior in an attempt to differentiate normal gamers from terrorist gamers. Perhaps this means that terrorists are clearly not as good at WoW as the average 13 year old kid from Milwaukee? I can’t wait for the Intelligence community to begin breaking down doors based on whether on not someone is able to enough Kobold candles to allow the innkeeper in Goldshire to stay in business.
Even better, when Homeland Security discovers that more than 50% of the 9 million players elect to play “Horde” side and fight for Evil (including performing assassination missions, poisoning whole villages, and waging all kinds of guerrilla warfare in coordinated Raid strikes against population centers housing good guys), that 4.5 million American citizens will find themselves on a lovely little Watch List, no doubt. If you are particularly good at being evil, you might even get a stern talking to in a little room in Cuba. Me, I’m switching to an Alliance human paladin called “AmericaRox” as soon as possible.
Obviously, the Intelligence community doesn’t have a clue how heterogeneous and abnormal this online society is. But I have no doubt that they will spend sufficient years and millions to determine precisely how weird all of us who play this game are. I just hope they have DSL at Guantanamo so I can agree to do online undercover work in exchange for my freedom.
Some days, I don’t even have to make things up. Go Vols.