Those of you who have read my blog since its origins know that I’m a gamer (if you don’t know what that means, you might as well stop reading now).  Lately, I’ve been trying out Spore (meh), but I’m sure that I’ll soon return to my first love, World of Warcrack Warcraft, especially now that Blizzard is putting out the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, right after the election.

Little did I know, however, that playing WoW actually makes me a potential terrorist:

The American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans.

In a presentation late last week at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington, Dr. Dwight Toavs, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, gave a bit of a primer on virtual worlds to an audience largely ignorant about what happens in these online spaces. Then he launched into a scenario, to demonstrate how a meatspace plot might be hidden by in-game chatter.

If you play WoW, you’re gonna love the scenario, complete with graphics, that the Pentagon researcher put together.

Two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the “White Keep” inside the “Stonetalon Mountains.” The major objective is to set off a “Dragon Fire spell” inside, and make off with “110 Gold and 234 Silver” in treasure. “No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast,” one player, “war_monger,” crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Dragon Fire” is an unconventional weapon. And “110 Gold and 234 Silver” tells the plotters how to align the game’s map with one of Washington, D.C.

Here’s a set a maps he put together.  For those who don’t know the game, the terrain is a part of WoW’s virtual world and the discussion to the right is supposed to be two players chatting in-game:

Okay, looks perfectly normal.  But wait — it’s actually Washington, DC:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Oh man, Pentagon, you’re killing me.  I want to work at a think tank that lets me play WoW all day.

Three observations.

1.  I think the Pentagon just might have better things to do.  For example, they might want to think about trying to raid that real-world StoneTalon Keep known as Osama Bin Laden’s freaking cave.

2.  Warning:  Geeky WoW insider stuff follows.

If you’re going to create a scenario where terrorists are using WoW, you might want to know something about WoW.  I just checked Thottbot (the WoW geek version of Google), and there is no such thing as a White Keep.  Same with the Dragon Fire spell.  Nobody in the game talks about gold and silver numbers because the game is randomized in such a way that you don’t know how much gold and silver the mobs drop.

Furthermore, since Stonetalon is a fairly low-level zone, there is no freaking way there’d be that much cash there.  If they wanted to use numbers like that, they’d just use map coordinates.  Oh, and there’s no freaking way that Blizzard wouldn’t notice a guild trying this kind of stuff.

While Stonetalon is fairly low-level, it’s not level 1.  The terrorists would have to play for about three weeks before they could go into Stonetalon without getting pwned (and you can’t even see the map in Stonetalon without having explored it).

Oh, and nobody talks in real time — they talk in server time.  Don’t ask.

What a n00b.

End Geeky WoW insider stuff.

3.  WoW players can be divided into three categories:  fourteen-year-olds, twenty-something punk/thrash/hardcore/metal fans, and ex-Dungeon and Dragon geeks (like me), most over thirty years old (with apologies to Ta-Nehisi Coates).  These people hate n00bs and would just waste these guys, metaphorically speaking.

I may have to eat these words someday, but I seriously doubt that terrorists would have either the patience or the knowledge of pop culture to survive long enough to pull this off.  The Chuck Norris jokes in Barrens chat alone would be enough to drive them away.

And as I noted earlier, the Pentagon should a hell of a lot less time wandering around Outland and a whole hell of a lot more time trying to take down that real-life level 70 warlock living in a cave somewhere in Waziristan.

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