Picture Perfect Paranoia

Apologies for being gone from the anime blogosphere for almost 2 weeks. Had my hardware fail on me, and thus it can’t sync with my internet connection.

Well, the problem’s been solved already, so here I am typing again.

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Well, this is one statistic I am happy about:

Akismet has caught 49,312 spam for you since you first installed it.

Ha ha ha

Think twice before spamming. Don’t even try bacning me, cause it ain’t gonna work.

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While this ain’t new, this is something of an eye-opener for those looking to engage in MMORPG.

Runescape’s Cheating Scene: Welcome to The Dark Side

The thing you’ve got to realize about video games is the more advanced they become the more closely they begin to emulate reality, I mean that is the point after all… trying to emulate reality as closely as our technology allows in some sort of fun and entertaining way. The introduction of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMORPG) was an incredibly innovative leap in video game technology, it uses our advances in communication technology to effectively emulate a reasonably functional social atmosphere while still managing to keep the players entertained and focused. This is an amazing thing; you can now create and maintain social relationships that are almost as good as the ones in real life while sitting in front of your computer playing a game. The other thing that has come with the introduction of MMORPGs is the ability to consistently add new content to the game, essentially making it so the game never ends, providing the gamer with a space that he may participate in for incredibly long periods of time. So I mean when your in this space for extended periods of time, and there’s this intricate social atmosphere, and it’s entertaining and all that jazz, and as familiarity grows it starts to become more and more like real life, becoming a second life in some sense. In moderation, this is ok, however some people reach the point where they actually prefer the virtual reality to their day-to-day life, and it becomes an escape of sorts, which, as far as I’m concerned, is comparable to the same mentality our society uses against drug addicts.

This is no longer a game. To some people, this is an acceptable reality. As such the imaginary things in this game start to attain a real life value – the more games emulate reality the more influence they have in our actual reality. So now we’ve got this problem where people are assigning real life monetary value to these entirely intangible game objects such as high level characters and the virtual money within the game, and this is where our problem begins.

See, while it may seem like a cookie-cutter explanation, dig deep into the article, as well as the issue, and you may realize that this is a serious and deliberate attempt to extort money from someone you don’t even know physically and only through the handle that person carries.

Now I’m not scaring you or anything. Try to side on the err of caution. Play safe, stay safe.

…And this is why I’d rather download games that don’t require an Internet connection constantly.