[MUD-Dev] Online Games Fighting Terrorism

[Dave Rickey]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16433-2002Dec5.html

No comment....

--Dave

<EdNote: Below>

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Outgaming Osama 
By David Ignatius
Friday, December 6, 2002; Page A45

Can online gaming help defeat Osama bin Laden? That's not as silly a
proposition as it may sound.

A Pentagon-sponsored group called the Highlands Forum met this week
to discuss what are known as "Massively Multiplayer Online Games."
These games, which can allow several million people to play, are
among the hottest new trends in the Internet world, and they may
have some fascinating uses in fighting terrorist networks.

The cutting edge for these multiplayer games is South Korea, which
probably has the world's deepest penetration of high-speed (or
"broadband") Internet connections. According to online gaming expert
J.C. Herz, more than 2 million people a month play South Korea's
most popular online game, Lineage, with as many as 180,000 of them
signed on some nights.

Lineage is a Korean variant of the sort of Dungeons and Dragons
combat that's so popular in computer gaming. It's a role-playing
game, set in medieval Europe, in which the followers of an evil
king's stepson help him try to regain his rightful place on the
throne. The followers are known as the "Blood Pledges," and they try
to capture castles -- which then allows them to levy taxes, buy more
weapons and continue their assault against the usurper.

Explains Herz: "Competing Blood Pledges, large gangs of players that
can number in the hundreds, lay siege to each other's castles for
hours at a time, on fat broadband connections that allow the battles
to play out in smooth resolution, in their full glory." Much of this
gaming is done in Korea's 26,000 game parlors, known as "baangs."

Lineage isn't popular with Americans, notes Herz, "partly because
it's a game where not everyone can be the boss." Koreans like a
"tightly defined clan hierarchy," she observes, whereas in American
role-playing games, it often seems that "everyone is the Lone
Ranger."

Among the popular American equivalents to Lineage are Everquest and
Ultima Online. Everquest, a massively multiplayer online world
created by Sony, can host 350,000 players, with more than 100,000
playing simultaneously. Sony charges each player $10 a month to join
this online world, where the games can last for months.

Next year a massive online game called Star Wars Galaxies is
scheduled to be released by Verant and LucasArts. It could attract
more than a million subscribers and have 300,000 simultaneous users,
according to Herz. It might take months for players to traverse
hyperspace, she says, and they will have to create "a full-fledged
economic and political system."

Herz explains that "as a design and engineering challenge, in sheer
scale and complexity Star Wars Galaxies rivals the construction of a
space station."

What makes these massive online games fascinating -- in addition to
their "human anthill" quality -- is that they may provide new
insights into what's known as "network-centric warfare."

Defense intellectuals such as Linton Wells II, a deputy assistant
secretary of defense who is responsible for command, control,
communications and intelligence, believe that the Pentagon must
realign itself for "network-centric" operations. In their view,
adversaries such as bin Laden's al Qaeda group are really networks
-- highly dispersed units that have the same loose but robust
structure as the nodes of a computer network.

The intellectual groundwork for this "netwar" analysis was laid out
in a paper published on the Internet in October 2001 by two Rand
Corp. analysts, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. "It takes networks
to fight networks," they argued. But it has been difficult to
imagine what these anti-network networks might look like.

That's why the massive online games are so intriguing. The ability
to connect many hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously opens
the possibility for sharing information, tasking both combatants and
civilian rescue workers, and "pulsing" adversaries with diffuse but
well-coordinated counterattacks.

Herz, who is the author of a recent book titled "Joystick Nation,"
notes that computer games have the same roots as military
simulations. The difference is that computer gaming took off -- with
many thousands of programmers helping refine the software --
especially after the Internet made communication and file sharing
easy. PC gaming also developed its own intricate social structure --
through chat rooms, Web sites, rankings and other means of instant
communication among the user network.

The civilian PC war games are now much more complex and
sophisticated than their Pentagon predecessors -- and, at the very
least, online gaming could help make military games more realistic.

But the challenging idea is that the online gaming world could
provide models for much more advanced ways of responding to
threats. It could create real-time networks for a kind of command
and control that has never been attempted. The peer-to-peer
connections of the online world could also break down some of the
time-wasting and bureaucratic hierarchies that continue to obstruct
military planning and operations.

Bin Laden and his allies certainly aren't playing a game. But it's
just possible that online gaming could provide some fresh insights
into combating and ultimately containing this terrorist threat.
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