Surveillance and Virtual Worlds: Looking for Terrorists in World of Warcraft

Lisa Nakamura

Wed., June 10, 2:00–3:00, Browsing Library (2nd floor, West Central)

Virtual worlds have been both touted as democratic social spaces that provide innovative tools for learning and critiqued as time-wasters, family-destroyers, and killers of sleep-deprived young Asian men in PC gaming parlors. They have not, however, been identified as havens for terrorists until recently. “Reynard” is an experimental “seedling” project of the Office of the Department of National Intelligence that carefully restricts its aims to conducting “unclassified research in a public virtual world environment” rather than surveilling individual users (Data Mining Report (unclassified), 2008). However, its mission to “study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community” implies that terrorists are to be found in virtual worlds without a doubt, and that social dynamics per se are inseparable from terrorist ones. Thus, all types of “social interaction” in virtual worlds could be scrutinized.

The ethos of transparency that underpins the visual culture of surveillance is stretched to its limit in the Reynard project — and indeed, the project of “spying on” virtual worlds is itself a limit case for surveillance studies. On the one hand, the project acknowledges the sweep and importance of virtual worlds as populous spaces where strategizing, socializing, and meaningful social activity occur. On the other hand, it signals the ongoing elimination of spaces of ludic possibility through digital play and interaction that make these worlds so appealing to so many.

The most common critique of Reynard among World of Warcraft players who posted to the Wired News Blog article is a pragmatic one — many are unopposed to the notion of surveillance as a general principle, but almost all are quite skeptical that it will work. As “Rumrunner” posted on February 22, “Good luck getting a baseline of ‘cultural norms’ from 15 yr olds hopped up on bong hits. Maybe they can start by data-mining Barrens chat. lmao.” (Singel, 2008). Many fear being incorrectly identified as terrorists because of decisions they made long ago in constructing their avatars or social groupings. As “Duncan” remarked wryly in a comment to the Wired News Blog on February 23, 2008, “I knew that I shouldn’t have named by [sic] guild al qaeda!” The freedom to parody, satire, or in any way reference politics, nation, race, and the “war on terror” is not guaranteed by Blizzard’s End User License Agreement (EULA), but nor is it entirely restricted. However, in the future the possibility of surveillance by government agencies may make this a dangerous activity. As “Bob” posted ironically, “The Next Step will be a required retina scan to login to WoW, with presentation of identity papers before you are allowed to create a character. There is nothing more important than the pursuit of terrorism.” (Singel, 2008). The step from this type of pattern-matching dataveillance to more intrusive types of surveillance is a short one, as game avatars are examined and profiled just as their users have long been in public spaces.