“LOG OFF, NOW!”

You may recognize this as the climactic line of the television previews for last Wednesday’s episode of CBS prime time series CSI New York. In the short preview, it lends the scary impression to the viewer that its resident video game murderer can somehow kill one directly through the computer. Pretty climactic indeed.

I wonder now about how safe gamers, particularly females, feel online in the game realm. How seriously do we take privacy?

The question should really start as: Do we even consider it at all?

While the episode, Down the Rabbit Hole, did not feature a supernatural type murder through machine, it revolved around a killer who used the online game Second Life to access information needed to get to the intended victims. It got me thinking of how safe we really are in the online World - of Warcraft (and other MMORPGs and online social-driven games, of course), and how seriously we take our safety.

You hear in the news sometimes of digital predators; game stalkers. To the sane person these stories seem inane and horrifying at the same time, and you ask yourself what’s wrong with the world. And then most probably you don’t give it another thought as you type in your login credentials and enter the virtual world.

Do you think of what might be waiting for you there?

Not actively, is my guess. And who should really have to? All you want to do is have fun…

The picture painted by much of the news or web and magazine articles is one of a sinister cloaked and hooded villain sneaking through the dark alleyways that are perpetrated to make up one hundred percent of our most beloved online games. That somehow we gamers thrive in and populate some hideous underdark covered over in a façade of cute cuddly wolfies, piglets, and the odd dragon. Something’s out there, and it’s gonna getcha - IRL. It’s the “big bad”.

But those of us who play online games know our chosen medium of entertainment really is a bunch of fantastical beasties, ghostly wizards, and a heck of a lot of saving the universe from giant bugs. We know the hype of the hooded and cloaked figure up to mischief and no good, as depicted by most media, is a rare occurrence and that, while perfectly realistic, will be thwarted by some good old fashioned common sense. Media talks about this “big bad”, but most people generally won’t feel threatened. Don’t meet people you don’t know (at least without the safety of friends), don’t give out your address or phone. Don’t read from the book. Don’t chant magic spells into mirrors. Don’t feed them past midnight. You know the drill, you’ll be okay.

But is that a false sense of security? Is it the “it won’t happen to me” syndrome? Do women in gaming take necessary precautions to protect themselves from the “little bad”? Is it even possible?

The Little Bad. In þsy101, assuming you didn’t fall asleep or just plain skip out entirely, you probably learned the concept of accumulative stressors. Your textbook may have presented you with a classic-style example of the little stressors and how very common they are: burning toast, losing keys, finding keys only to learn the car won’t start, calling a cab, finally being chewed out for being late to work, all in the matter of an hour. The point of the example? Little stressors can be just as bad as the big things, and are much more common. You’ll burn your toast before you break your leg, but seeing as how it’s much more frequent that toaster’s likely to be out the window.

Let’s move that example away from the individual to the general concept. Little has the potential to still be pretty upsetting, and small-time offenders can be prevalent.

How many people know your username and password? While sharing is against many games’ Terms of Service agreements, relationships with others will always enable motivation to break the rule.

How many games divulge personal information from the account management screen? While most will keep very sensitive information secret, many usually show last names. Sometimes e-mail addresses, and even phone numbers and billing addresses are present here. And anyone with your credentials can login to the game’s website and view it all.

What happens when one of these people slips through the cracks? How does someone get to know your login credentials if you’re careful with your identity? They start to mean something to you. Social gaming creates connections between people, forms bonds, and brings personalities and all walks of life out of isolation into a wider world where full anonymity is usually frowned upon in groups of very attached e-friends. Friends who may not have deserved that status to begin with.

E-drama and backstabbing seems to occur much more often than one would comfortably like. In my experience it seems that most victims of this security breech by social betrayal generally have issues choosing decent friends. There is, of course, always the fact that you never truly know a person, but the task of deciding who is most worthy of a strong friendship and trust can come down to skill. If in doubt, just don’t. Please, just don’t.

What else do you divulge to someone you know, or think you know, well and trust? Your photograph perhaps? We all think finding out just who that person is behind the screen is fun. Face it, it really is. “Oh, that’s why she makes so many blond comments. Makes total sense.” “He totally sounds sillier on Ventrilo than he looks!” Not often do you remember, of course, that any image sent to another can easily be saved to their hard drive.

I can’t help but get the phrase “For later use” into my head when photographs are mentioned. I’ll let you fill in the blanks, and please do, as it’s something many a female gamer I know keeps in mind themselves.

Obtaining a heightened knowledge of the people behind the characters is fostered by the social networking offered not only by the game itself but also by game mods or third party peripherals.

Voice chat is area in this world that female gamers may find particularly tricky to navigate. Often required in guilds, it is nowadays even commonly used in casual PUG settings where groups of strangers recruit each other in order to defeat a particular quest, instance, or task.

Do you speak and reveal gender, a very basic attribute but one that can potentially garner you unwanted attention? What will you achieve by speaking? Will it simply further the cause of the party by getting crucial strategy or warnings out faster than the speed of type? Or will you be greeted by astonishment, immaturity, prejudice, or just be plain ignored?

In many cases of personal experience there is surprise at me truly being a female and not a male playing the usually much better-looking character of a girl in the digital world (yeah, I can understand, dudes are usually hideous in game). So far I have been fortunate to avoid most negative effects of gender revelation. What harassment I have experienced was usually taken care of with an ignore command and perhaps a little bit of intentionally causing the in-game death of the offender. Hey, I’m only holy specced, I ain’t no saint.

Sadly, I am familiar of situations where females are looked upon as e-whores and virtually spit on for speaking in voice chat for their particular guild or PUG run. As soon as the first word is out of your mouth and across the data stream you’re a target by people who take this stance. All for what? Revealing your gender in an online game.

People like this, or the overly obsessed fanboy/girl, or the just plain bored could end up having you in their sights, and you may garner more of their attention than is healthy. What will they do after that? Who’s to say? But if you’ve left a trail of your personal information out there, and they’re sad and mental enough, they may try to sniff it out. I personally wouldn’t like to receive text messages, phone calls, e-mails or, dare I say it, visits from anyone unauthorized.

I have high hopes for the area of voice chatting, though, through familiarity and more widespread use. Nowadays with voice chats being integrated into the games themselves (and thus not requiring extra effort and money), I hope the frightening prospect of being hounded and harassed for gender and other personal aspects dies down considerably for all chat participants. This especially including the feminine-sounding male who is labeled and persecuted according to a sexual preference stereotype.

How many little bad, small time stressors are you going to run into out there? Like I mentioned at the start of this post (maybe just call it a ramble) you probably don’t even think about it actively or in depth. You, like me, most likely just try to be careful and use your best judgment.

Are we prepared? Probably not. But here’s hoping it won’t bite us in the ass anytime soon. I now take this opportunity of free time to search the Internet for stories of game induced crime as a substitute for some much needed Halloween horror. Don’t cry, 30 Days of Night. It just didn’t work out between us, baby.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Editorial, Holiday Themed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.