A disjointed college essay about why the NSA should spy on games

Remember when you'd need to write an essay about something but never quite had much to say? The general concept was there, but you didn't know or care enough to give it any depth. So you'd just keep branching out, giving shallow explorations of a dozen different related topics. Most of them would do nothing to advance your central theme. Those that did at least seem to advance it were so shallow that their actual contribution was negligible. If you were lucky this was a draft and the professor could point out the flaws. With a reality check you'd delve a little deeper and replace some of the width with depth. Sometimes it was the final draft. And sometimes it gets published.

This is what that looks like.
Virtual Worlds are Real:
Avatars have consequences offline. No wonder U.S. intelligence agencies are looking into them.

 In summary:

1. The media mocks virtual worlds, thereby making it look ridiculous when government investigates them.
2. These are new communication platforms and intelligence agencies should keep an eye on those.
3. The appearance of avatars affects how we interact with them and therefore a virtual bin Laden would be a potentially useful recruiting tool.
4. Online behavior affects our offline behavior.
5. Offline behavior affects our online behavior.
6. America's Army was an effective recruiting tool.

These are all worthwhile things to discuss. Given the headline and tag, points one and two seem to be the important ones. Point one gets a decent bit of space, while point two gets a few sentences. Surely this is where you'd want to discuss how to do this surveillance, based on the assumption that when governments see new forms of surveillance their second action is to spy on them. Is creating avatars in that world the best way to go about things? In most games that's going to give an extremely narrow view, restricted by in-game geography, social tools, and content. It's hard to properly interrogate the next bin Laden when he won't give you a guild invite, put you on ignore, and reported you to a GM for harassment. Some form of direct access to in-game communication seems like the logical way to go, but then you either need permission, something tech companies are starting to get wary of, or to break in, which has its own set of problems. The sixth point could tie into the first two. Surely it would be a good idea to keep tabs on players in Al-Queda's Army.

Yet there is the counter-point that is ignored: someone owns and controls these worlds. They monitor the communications. This isn't interception; it's directly sending messages to their servers, with their programs, and them sending it along. Even if intelligence agencies took no interest at all, there is still a Big Brother watching in the form of a company. They might not be eager to give the NSA access, but they're at least as eager not to give terrorists access. Virtual worlds just don't seem like a good place to discuss evil deeds, well beside EVE. On top of all that, shouldn't the agencies have defended themselves with some vague results? Not "we caught so and so", but at least "we've tracked some suspected guys and are continuing to track them." When even they aren't pretending it's worthwhile, that's a pretty damning argument.

The third point is a fascinating bit of psychology and definitely worth further study, but the recruitment angle is the exact absurdity that makes the media mock this sort of thing. Similarly, points four and five are worth studying. I've often been curious of how these virtual worlds with their different concepts of need and scarcity could affect our perceptions of real world economic systems, and how we bring those real world concepts into a place with a different context, where they may make no sense at all.

In conclusion: This is what happens when someone writes a book and has to promote it, not by promoting the actual book, but by trying to shoehorn everything into the latest media trend on why we should be spied on in every possible world.

It's too easy to be wrong

The internet is giving rise to a whole new morality. Or lack of. I've noticed a pattern: things which nearly effortless are hard to see as wrong.

A few Sundays ago I wrote not so nicely about the orb speculators. Gevlon wrote a strange sort of rebuttal, boiling down to "The higher the price is, the more likely it will be used by someone worthwhile." That's actually less ridiculous than it sounds, I agree with the general concept. Others commented in my post, some quite offended by my suggestion that buying, holding, and reselling, which change absolutely nothing about the product, not making it into something more valuable, is unethical. Somehow the market has become the new morality for some people. If it's profitable it must be okay!

But that's not my point here. Instead I want to look at it from another angle: the way people could not even consider that there could be anything wrong. Why not? I believe it is because buying up 5-10g orbs is as simple as a few clicks and seems to have no effect on anyone or anything until you resell in a few weeks for massive profits. It looks like printing money but without even causing inflation.

It's easy and it benefits me, how could it be wrong?

I see a similar behavior in software and music piracy. I bet a dozen clicks and a bit of waiting could get you 95% of the music or software you'd ever want. If it was wrong, why would it be so easy? Bad things are hard, like stealing and murder and that sort of thing. Thieves have to break windows and stuff, not click a mouse a dozen times. It doesn't help that it's not theft the way we'd see it in the real world.

The internet, electronics in general, are a strange sort of world, and the words and rules of the 'real world' don't work quite right there. For another example, see Tobold try to figure out friends on Facebook. Friends that aren't friends but we call friends. Facebook friend sounds also insulting. But really anything less than friend sounds a bit mean, as if to say "Just so we're clear, we're not actually friends, so don't get any ideas." But on the easy note, think of how easy it is to friend someone. Trivial. While it's nor morally wrong, it is perhaps dishonest, but it's so easy, we don't really bother to consider: Is this person actually a friend? Actually in the past year or so I started ignoring friend requests for people I didn't see at least once a week. Then I just stopped checking Facebook at all. This process of doing nothing was assisted by my login/saved name eventually running out and it being 'too hard' (relative to benefit) to actually type in my name and password check it anymore.

I think of when Tobold experimented with anonymous, unmoderated comments, not even deleting anything. And told everyone first. Someone spammed NIGGER a few dozen times. He probably thought it was funny. And what's the harm? Just 6 letters and some copy-paste. Harmlessly easy. The trolls and spammers have it so easy. Imagine on the forums; quote, "wrong", post. Just like that you can annoy someone and potentially derail a thread. But it's so easy, why would anyone ever hold that against them?

The ninja in randoms, the person who gets the drop they want and bails, the partial guild runs that kick competition just before the boss: they're all so easy.

Click click click. It can't be wrong! It was so easy.

What it comes down to is failure to engage the mind. Trivially easy activities don't force us to take time or effort to consider them. We don't justify them because we don't have time. They are done and done.

Imagine if buying orbs required going to a buyer and explaining "Prices are going to go up, but this is a gamble, so I am willing to take on that risk to give you gold now. However keep in mind that if I am so sure of the risk to buy up not just your orbs, but those of many other people, it's probably a sure shot. Really you're an idiot to sell them to be at these prices" And you can't macro it into your trade macro, gotta say it per stack.

Or if music piracy required going all the way to the store, opening the CD, copying it to your laptop, and carefully rewrapping it.

Or if leaving an instance or kicking someone required taking the few seconds to give a reason.

Obviously these will reduce activity purely due to the added inconvenience. But I believe there will be a further effect as people think during it "What am I doing?"