Criminal / Terrorist use of MMO's

dagonweb

Right now people are advertising on the much maligned www.sl-escorts.com to peddle webcam girls. The going rate starts at 4500L$ per 10 minutes, which amounts of 10-15 dollars a pop, but they throw in 30 minutes of streamed porn if 10 minutes aint enough. Will they make money?

This ain't business that's very thoughprovoking or shocking. The top escorts I know in Second Life score about 1000L per 30 minute session. That isn't excessive and the money tends to stay in-game. A few brokering virtual clubs have made 20.000 Real World $ in SL (like barbies) per year but that has always been a fairly grassroots & in-game endeavor. SL has a pretty awfull user interface and isn't transparant to new gamers all that easy. That's why games like naughty america are jumping on the virtual dating bandwagon - in a characteristic completely silly american manner ofcourse .... - is there a market for this stuff?

Like I said, Second Life with a way better interface may get millions of subscribers, and many of those would come to hose down their raging adolescent hormones. That's a huge market. Give SL a better user interface, a halfway decent way to design buildings and a way to stream voice in-game and I see them become bigger than WoW. 

But as the above example shows, there are huge dangers when this happens. Right now the US is still psychologically traumatized by the 911 event. Types like the neocons and far christian right are arguably exploiting that fear to press for their pet reforms. The rest of the world, for instance the UK, has seen terrorism like 911 and is a good bit more stoic, but the US isn't used to largescale terror strikes on it's homesoil. So I expect this climate of paranoia to endure for a few years.

If neoconservatives, lawmakers or political christian nutjobs get the idea that Second Life (or similar mediums) are being used to peddle porn, accomodate profitable gambling, worse: peddle kiddie porn or virtual sex with underage girls, then there will be a most unfortunate backlash.

Imagine a bunch of people brokering warez in some form through SL. There are easy ways to make communications in SL intransparant to wiretapping. Depict coded messages on T shirts, or by means of prerecorded sound bits in exotic languages and you'll make a wiretap a difficult proposal. Hardecore criminals could use SL as a means of communication.

And so could <enter The Rock soundtrack> terrorists.

I personally don't think terrorist communications are all that important or vital to tap. They tap communications for wholly different reasons than terrorists. I think america is far less of a democracy than most people assume. But the NSA is becoming quite a bloated institution and that means careers for decades ! I can envision types that would love to shackle and fetter internet, games and MMO's with the superficial argument of criminal/terrorist transactions.

Imagine the NSA shutting down WoW for a week because they claim evidence that a plot has surfaced to detonate a thorium-based nuclear device in upper Manhattan. We'll all be laughing ofcourse, but imagine the damages to Blizzard and the reputation to the industry at large. Mister Wilson, the guy from the supermarket and Mrs. Brown, they'll all be saying those online games are all nothing but dens for pervers, colombian drug kartels, atheists, communists and terrists to meet, exchange ideas and plot agains murrca.

That is not good for the few dozen of MMO's in development.