World of Warcraft now terrorist research

On-line "terrorists" blowing themselves up and spreading disease inside the video game World of Warcraft may give counterterrorists a view of similar real-world actions.

Such activities in the massively multiplayer online game,which has a history of in-game terrorist activity, bear an eerie resemblance to actual terrorism, and analyzing terror tactics in Warcraft could prove more effective than recent simulations that counterterrorists have been using.

Early on, players found a curse in a dungeon that would turn them into living bombs. After finding this curse hey then teleported to major cities and detonated themselves, killing other players. They gradually began to target areas where large numbers of players gathered, often at auction houses or banks. Eventually, attacks happened so frequently that some players began avoided dangerous cities. They also began using a contagious curse called Corrupted Blood that could kill most players in seconds. Players purposely infected other players and created a semi-permanent source of disease in cities' non-player characters.

"People got really smart about figuring out how to cause the most damage to the largest number of people," said Robert Allen, a level-60 mage and self-admitted virtual bioterrorist who purposely spread an in-game contagion to kill other players.

Charles Blair, deputy director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said he thinks the game could be used as a powerful new way to study how terrorist cells form and operate. CETIS already uses computer models to study terrorists' tactics and decision-making, but World of Warcraft's "army" of players adds a realistic aspect that might be more helpful than even the best artificial intelligence.

"The main strength is that [Warcraft] involves 'real' people making real decisions in a world with some kind of [controllable] bounds," said Blair. "To put it academically, you have both dependent and independent variables."


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