All posts by Paul Raven

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Shrinks to form raid guild in World of Warcraft

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gamer playing World of WarcraftComputer games, especially persistent MMOs like World of Warcraft, are highly addictive – or so we’re told, albeit principally by people with money to make from treating said addiction. Indeed, gaming addiction is such a potentially lucrative market debilitating social cancer that psychiatrists want to form their own guild and start treating WoW addicts within the framework of the game itself. [via TechDirt; image by jerine]

Yes, you read that correctly. Treating people for MMO addiction. In an MMO.

Dr Graham said that some players were so addicted to these massively multiplayer online games that they played them for up to 16 hours a day, leading them to neglect their social lives and education.

He has called on Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, to waive or discount the costs associated with joining the game so that therapists can more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment.

“We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it’s already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn’t be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players,” said Dr Graham.

“Of course one problem we’re going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they’re probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.

“We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end.

Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this more than a bit weird? If an expert in alcohol addiction started saying “well, we think we should start drinking in bars so we can really reach the people who need our services, and moreover the bar owners should let us drink for free. Granted, we don’t really have a taste for alcohol ourselves, but I’m sure we’ll pick it up eventually if it’s for the good of the patient,” they’d be discredited immediately, right?

I suspect the real story here is one of psychiatry quacks chasing the hard-to-win money of middle-class parents who don’t understand their kids and who think that there must be a treatable medical reason for that… which is a market that will probably never completely die off, sad to say.

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SocNets == Groupthink?

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Via those crazy kids at grinding.be comes an article whose writer analyses the culture of social networks and media with the “groupthink” criteria of Irving L Janis, coming to the conclusion that our favourite websites and communication channels may be (gasp!) gathering us into groups where the established and accepted truths remain unquestioned.

It’s not the first time the issue has been raised (and frankly I’ve given it greater credence on those occasions when I’ve seen it on sites who employ a copyeditor and/or whose side-barred “all-time most popular article” isn’t entitled “10 Ways To Have Fun With Boobs”) but my response remains the same: find me a human social construct or communication platform that doesn’t put vague ticks in most of those boxes.

Groupthink is a function of being human; it’s the phenomenon that makes party-based political systems not just possible but debilitatingly pervasive. Do social networks enable groupthink to take root? Sure they do – but I think it’s safe to say they offer more opportunity for dissent and debate than the old centralized broadcast media that they’re replacing ever did. As always, the problem isn’t technology, it’s people.

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The Floating Citadel

Seems like hardly a week can pass by without some new example of architectural futurism cropping up in my RSS feeds. Here’s the latest nugget: The Citadel is (or rather will be, when it gets built as something more than a conceptual model) an example of the sea-beleaguered Dutch attempting to come to terms with the geography of the tidal plain that is their country.

The Citadel - floating apartment complex concept

The project will be built on a polder, a recessed area below sea level where flood waters settle from heavy rains. There are almost 3500 polders in the Netherlands, and almost all of them are continually pumped dry to keep flood waters from destroying nearby homes and buildings. The New Water Project will purposely allow the polder to flood with water and all the buildings will be perfectly suited to float on top of the rising and falling water.

[…]

A high focus will be placed on energy efficiency inside the Citadel. Greenhouses are placed around the complex, and the water will act as a cooling source as it is pumped through submerged pipes.

The Citadel seems to be an officially sanctioned project, but it’s easy to imagine that once the concepts behind it are loose in the market, buildings like it could become commonplace in marginal or disputed regions considered useless because of their water-logged state… something like a half-way house between regular land living and seasteading. If the increasingly alarming data coming from climate scientists is valid, there’s certainly going to be a lot of floodplains and polders to build on. [image by WaterStudio.nl]

A final thought: if architecture is a kind of science fiction (as Chairman Bruce and others have implied), are shiny Bright Green projects like The Citadel equivalent to the boldly optimistic pulp stories of the fifties and sixties? Will the actual buildings of the near future turn out to be something less lovely, more pragmatic, weathered by environmental compromise and gloweringly Ballardian?

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Will laser propulsion beam us up to orbit?

Some lasers, yesterdayThe space geeks among you will doubtless have heard of the laser propulsion concept before, but it’s largely remained ensconced in the realms of the theoretical so far.  However, the superbly-named Leik Myrabo reckons he has cracked it, and is currently working on bringing his ideas to a commercially viable status:

Basic research experiments using high-powered lasers are underway in Brazil, with experts investigating the central physics of laser-heated airspikes and pulsed laser propulsion engines for future ultra-energetic craft.

At the Brazil-based lab, a hypersonic shock tunnel is linked to two pulsed infrared lasers with peak powers reaching the gigawatt range – the highest power laser propulsion experiments performed to date, Myrabo said.

“In the lab we’re doing full-size engine segment tests for vehicles that will revolutionize access to space,” Myrabo emphasized. “It’s real hardware. It’s real physics. We’re getting real data…and it’s not paper studies.”

“Right now, we’re chasing the data,” Myrabo said. “When you fire into the engine, it’s a real wallop. It sounds like a shotgun going off inside the lab. It’s really loud.”

The laser propulsion experiments, Myrabo added, are also relevant to launching nanosatellites (weighing 1 to 10 kilograms) and microsatellites (10 to 100 kilograms) into low Earth orbit.

Now, colour me cynical if you will, but I reckon that last throwaway point there about the microsatellites may be the the more plausible goal for this technology, and the stuff about sending passenger vehicles into suborbital space is optimistic grandstanding designed to attract attention and investment. [image by Krassy Can Do It]

Even if the researchers (who are sponsored under international collaboration between the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Brazilian Air Force) are convinced of their omega point, cheap microsat launches will at least provide an income stream while development continues. Either way, it’s good to see another option on the table for commercial space launches.

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What are the rules of a cyberwar?

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Despite its age (and its semantic inaccuracy), the term “cyberwar” is cropping up a great deal in mainstream media of late, and promises to do so with increasing frequency as the world’s infrastructure becomes more tightly interwoven with the internet. The web is the ideal platform for modern guerrilla warfare – there are no distances to be travelled, no supply logistics to marshal, and one kid with a serious Red Bull habit can potentially muster as much digital muscle as a major nation-state or criminal syndicate (if there’s any real difference left between the two in political and economical terms).

All this leaves the military brass in an uncomfortable position. They know how to define the terms of a meatspace war – the sorts of things considered to be a deliberate act of agression by an opponent, and the proportional responses to be taken – but cyberwar is a different beast entirely, as Kim Zetter points out at Wired‘s Dual Perspectives blog:

In a battle where the militarized zone exists solely in the ether(net) and where anyone can wield the cyber-equivalent of a 10-ton bomb, how do we fight, let alone find, the enemy? What standard of proof will be used to determine the origin of an anonymous attack?

And how do we know if the anonymous cyberwarrior attacking us is a soldier from the Red Army or just a Jolt-guzzling teen in his mother’s basement. Or, perhaps, a Jolt-guzzling teen who’s also a covert mercenary for the Red Army. Should the U.S. take action against a band of student hackers in China suspected of working for their government if Chinese authorities deny responsibility for their aggression?

Furthermore, if computers running NASDAQ trades are brought to a halt in a cyber attack, is that a criminal offense for the FBI to investigate or a national security incident worthy of a counterstrike? And how will the U.S. respond to freelance cyber warriors who sell their services to any adversary who pays the highest bid?

All good questions… and all devoid of easy answers.

While the immediate issues arising are easy enough to understand – the fragility of certain pieces of national and international infrastructure, whether military or civilian – the long-view problem remains unspoken, for reasons just as obvious: nation-states are now vulnerable to small political players and rogue individuals in a way that has no precedent in recent history (if ever). And as that vulnerability becomes more apparent, the power and authority that comes from being the capstone of the old hierarchical pyramid will start to erode more quickly…