Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Terrorists Communicating Through MMORPGs

Former Dutch journalist and part-time wow gold entrepreneur Emile van Veen has published a techno-thriller novel, "MMORPG: How a computer game becomes deadly serious". Popular 3D engine Gamebryo will be utilized for Rocksmith, an Ubisoft-published guitar game in the works for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The fictitious scenario behind the book, according to the office website, that a wave of terrorist attacks is striking in the lowlands of Europe and there isn’t a trace of evidence to trace anything back to the instigators.

When trying out new ideas, it’s always easier to get everyone’s buy-in when you can actually get the mechanics running on-screen. Gamebryo allowed us to implement gameplay very quickly so we could prove our designs early on in the development process. While players are used to waiting for those cooldown times, turn based combats and lags, there always a chance that it will make the previous MMORPG's obslete or it would die down the trend alittle bit. The protagonist plays an online computer game and receives unusual messages and the authorities don’t take his concerns about the messages seriously. From there, the protagonist delves into the virtual world with a companion to root out the source of the threats before the terrorists’ end game is achieved.

If this is the http://www.centurylink.net/search/index.php?q=www.flywowgold.com case and TERA becomes popular in making those mechanics work, I think that TERA will lead this decade of MMORPGs and represent that MMORPG will offer in the future, hence why I think TERA will kick off this decade of MMORPGs, if all goes well. Given the violent context of many chats due to the nature of the games themselves, a discussion about  terrorism could be lost as white noise amidst other chat. Could this book be used as a “hey, this is a great new idea!” handbook for terrorists? In van Veen’s opinion, no, since this method has already been established as a known communication channel.