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Real World Anger Affecting MMOG Reality?
We reported late last week that FFXI was under a DDOS attack. The Japanese origin of the title may be the reason for the attack, as Ludonauts asks the question of whether chinese crackers may attacking the game because of political frustration. From the article: "Discussion on the Allakhazam forum points the attack at Chinese protesters angry about the deletion of references to Japanese war atrocities from history textbooks: the DDOS attacks began on April 9, the same day as the protests in China. In FFXI, this issue is linked to the question of 'gil-sellers,' players who farm in-game resources for real-world cash, who in FFXI are usually characterized as Chinese: many who are suspected of being gil-sellers have placed comments in their searchable information fields like 'Resisting all Japanese goods, long live the People's Republic of China.'" Commentary available from game girl advance, Broken Toys, and Terra Nova.
Especially when the article in question is just a copy/paste of the Terra Nova article, with only two typo-ridden sentences as commentary tacked on the end.
As for the DDOS attacks being linked to national unrest, it seems like a rather odd way to vent frustration and anger about the China/Japan situation. I can't imagine anyone in power noticing something as trivial as gameservers in the current situation, and the effect on the average Japanese user is slight at best.
...how globalizing the Internet can be. It can take localized conflicts and expand them to influence a much wider area.
This suggests that decentralization of popular services is even more important than ever before, both on a technical and social level. If someone has a monopoly on something that has a widely-spread fan base, and they give it a common address (DNS, IP, postal, conceptual, whatever), then individuals or groups from anywhere can disrupt that product everywhere.
I wonder how this is going to drive uptime-maintaining technology for MMORPGs. My impression is that existing systems aren't very good at failover. Virtualizing server systems and spreading them over clusters in a failover-compatible way would be a good start.
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If anyone wants further news about this, I found this to be interesting.
Basically, during the fall of one of the latter Chinese dynasties, protests against Japan were encouraged as the people had less faith in Confucianism and thus the emperor thought their anger against the Japanese could be used to rally national unity. In the same way, perhaps the current government's ideological grip is being lost as a communist economy is giving way to a much more open-market one and thus China again looks for a way to rally national unity.
Some could even argue that allowing for free forms of expression against the Japanese government could lessen desire for other, less desirable, open demonstrations (ala Tienaman Square).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.