Playing with the Databased Self: Perfect Surveillance in the Age of Virtual Worlds

Introduction: A Diagram of Perfect Surveillance

Bart Simon, Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal

It’s a typical day in the operations center at Blizzard HQ. The supervisor walks in on regular shift. Shades of West World, intimations of NASA mission control – rows of computer screens flash with data scrolling by in streams in front of hunched over operators typing, talking through mics and shouting at each other. At the front of a room a series of wall size monitors displaying a map of Azeroth, the world of warcraft. The fictional geography is irrelevant. This map represents a container of so many pixels of light… clustered together, moving about. The light changes based on the time of day and the shift gets ready from the post-patch evening rush when server load reaches maximum (Tuesdays approx. 8-11pm EST). Each pixel fixes the location of a player avatar (or perhaps an aggregate of these) and with a keystroke the character profile signaled by the avatar is displayed on screen. The data here is seemingly trivial – name, level, race, class, a list of gear perhaps. Its stuff you could easily find in the Armoury database. Another stroke however and the operator is in the game world either with an invisible camera monitoring the in-game activity of the avatar (including private whispers and tells) or maybe for fun the operator assumes a players point of view via an invisible avatar – in this form he shadows the avatar for a few minutes --- just a routine check.

A signal bleeps – the search algorithms have picked up something… this avatars name has been reported before and he is in possession of unusual amounts of gold for someone of his level. This is unusual…the operator must go deeper. Tied to this character in the central database is a player account – another “real” name, an address, a credit card number… Hold on, there is more than one account on the same credit card and so much high level gear accumulated in just a couple of weeks. The operator chuckles as the infamous Warden client is activated and the computer through which the account has been accessed and the avatar deployed is scanned for non-EULA compliant software and “illegal” mods. While this continues, the entire history of the avatar’s movements, actions and conversations in the game are recalled and analyzed. It’s all coded; time, place, even the precise action. This can be cross-referenced to the known profiles of farmers, hackers and even certain kinds of griefers. The software continues its work drawing on the central database – a list of known acquaintances is drawn up and each of these subsequently checked… within minutes more the account is terminated. There is no recourse. The age of perfect surveillance has begun.


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