Can WoW teach the US Government about Terrorism?

CIA 's
"I" will drop after that failure of project hahahah

i knew our government was crazy.

seriously i read like the first paragraph and burst out in laughter. i cant believe our government thinks like this...

they need an Intellect buff...

Goverment just stay out of video games, they don't wanna collect information on "terroists" they just wanna ruin something thats perfectly fine.

Absolutely moronic. Although this is a depiction of 'real' people making 'real' decisions its literally STUPID to base those on 'real' life considering everything, EVERYTHING in that game has no inclination to real life interaction WHAT SO EVER. BASICALLY- Government is using this to study the aspects of the gamer society, because like all things that you do- the government wishes to control/regulate what you can and cannot do. Its a waste of MY tax money, its a wast of MY governments time which should be spent on MUCH more valuable things, like I dunno getting bush out of office and REVERSING the dumb ass anti-terrorism NAZI laws that were put into place (no that is not an overstatement) Sadly what few people know is "Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism" was exactly the same ploy HITLER used before WW2- It's an invisible face to an invisible enemy used to shadow actions of very few men in great power BEHIND the puppetry you call the United States Government. Wake up- http://zeitgeistmovie.com/

If you find wasting money on this useful Look at the deficit and tell me how to pay that off first, WITHOUT slavery. (Basically every dollar in currency is loaned to the US at interested, therefor using every dollar to pay it back we would still be in debt) No wealth to pay a debt=slavery.

Pay the deficit without causing some sort of slavery and then I'll be fine with our government using money studying people obsessed with chuck norris.

I think they should work on the Intelligence part of their studies first. If they can nail that, perhaps then they'll realise what a witless exercise it is to try to draw comparisons between terrorism and a video game and go spend their money on something meaningful.

I think I is just a supid idea. How can WoW be used i terrorist study? It has nothin with the real world. Why dont they create a game that is more like the rl? If they want to use a game, why not Call of Duty? That is more realistic. WoW is si-fi fantasy, terroism is real.

I think the point here is not that you can find terrorists in video games, but rather use video games as a way of seeing how people go about doing "terrorist" acts. For example, that PvP guild may not be full of actual terrorists, and they may not do anything horrible in real life, but their behavior in the game might resemble how actual terrorists behave in real life.

Of course I say might, because that's the idea behind it but I'm not so sure it'd work.

It's a game, raiding IF is not raiding New York. It's an interesting idea but absolutely no point in putting time and money into it for finding any links to terrorism. In world of warcraft moral rules do not apply as seriously as real life e.g killing a human in the BG or pickpocketing someone.

Fuck Blair and politics tbh. Its a game for fuck sakes :/ no?

it's not saying WoW players are terrorists, it's an implication to the similarities between terrorism (or military action) and some aspects of the game. Just an example would be a raid on a city, whether it's IF, Org, UC, whatever, the primary point would be to gather enough ppl to go as far as you want (annoy players there or kill the leader/king/queen), so basic organisation. Then there's what the ppl being attacked do, do they accept it? do they fight back? It's not an ideal thing to base full real life strategies off, but it is a way to observe what ppl do and how they react.

I'm just saying look at how guilds operate. I'd much sooner relate this sort of thing to military (loosely) than terrorism, but still. Chess and the old stratego board games (and some even older versions like the ancient Egyptian chess like game) have military applications, if only in strategy developement. Even todays computer games help improve hand eye co-ordination that is a fundemental in using a firearm

I think they are onto something interesting (and has been for a while), though not really relevent on the game of WoW.

bottom line: it's only a game to be played and enjoyed for what it is, entertainment

im a terrorist... a 375 terrorist to be exact, i can make bombs, adamatite bombs.. they pwn, but dont tell the government, engineering is just starting to get good ;)

I completly agree with gde316. At what point in the article does it suggest all WOW players are terrorists? it dosent some of you people are coming up with absalute rubbish from this. They what to know how people think they dont think you are all bloody terrorists or terrorists are gonna play the game. Think before you comment something ridiculas. Tryna use this as an excuse to playwow all day? Even the american goverment isnt this stupid.

Maybe Alliance should send a Boeing crashing in Galvanar's head :D (i had to :P)

It seems to me that the simple fact that the people playing a "war" game could be an ideal comparison to terrorists. Think about it ... most people playing WoW are young and still lack a complete education, at least in military tactics. Most terrorists are thought to be uneducated. As with WoW, there are a few that are educated and become the leadership. Look at the alliance in AB; most of the time there is no leadership and people just run around doin whatever they feel like (then loose the BG). Similar to terrorist cells, with no leadership they tend to atteck less strategic targets. It's not that the government is directly comparing the game with terrorists, nor that they are trying to get the terrorists to play the game, nor that they are accusing WoW players of being terrorists. It's simply that they are looking at a relatively uneducated group that consistantly plays a game based on war strategy. If you take away the keyboard and replace it with a trigger you may see a corelation between the way decisions are made in the game and the way they are made by terrorist organizations.

The government is not comparing the game to terrorism, they are comparing the thought process of terrorists to gamers. Hoping to maybe find a better understanding of why the terrorists make decisions the way they do. It's easier to study the surplus of gamers than study the elusive terrorists.

GDE, maybe the US gov. should look at their foreign policies before looking into WoW as to find the "how" and "why"s of a terrorist.

GDE, Before you say that "most terrorists are uneducated", you might want to educate yourself with "Engineers of Jihad" (google it). The authors don't seem to understand cause and effect relationships very well but the data points they collected dispute your assertion. Most terrorists are either highly educated or quickly dead.

Relatively uneducated? WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? Majority of the people that play the game do have intelligence. I myself play the game simply to lose the monotony of day-to-day life. I know a few people in the game do the exact same thing. I run a guild with over 100 individual people (not characters, accounts) in it, and maybe 5% are the 'Young' people you are thinking of. Get your information straight before pissing everyone off.

And yet another American freedom falls under the Bush/Cheney regime. What kind of country do we live in when we can't even play a video game without being screened for terrorist ties or intentions? Orwellian, that's what.

I can't believe this! I knew they are dumb, but this is too much.

Sure, why not, I welcome the idea of eventually settling world conflicts on a PvP realm if it may come to that lol. But seriously... studying how terrorist cells form an operate in WoW?

Then again, what do I know, I thought it was a game.