I had a Guild Wars elementalist/ranger built around disabling players long enough to unload a few ultra powerful fatigue-based spells. I referred to this build frequently as a suicide bomber, as that’s basically what it was – the goal was to take down 2 people extremely quickly, but in doing so, I’d rack up so much fatigue that anyone else could easily take me out.

GW is built heavily on equal sized team vs team combat, so this was a perfectly valid – and effective – strategy. There’s no penalty of any kind for dying in pvp combat, and the goal is for your TEAM to win – it doesn’t matter whether you personally survive the match. You get immediately resurrected at the end of the round, and if your team wins, everyone gets the reward, regardless of who is and isn’t still alive.

So, what would this software see?
1. I use a heavily offensive, self-destructive battle tactic, taking out whoever I can with no regard to self-preservation. I probably get some bonus red flags for targeting the healers. 😛
2. The words “suicide” and “bomb” come up quite often in chat, and are a rather accurate description of what’s happening – in the GAME.

Obviously, that’s going to raise a very strong, very false, positive.

This is hardly a unique case. Games are GAMES – something you play for fun. Strategic games are all about winning at any “cost” – because really, there is no cost. Nothing dies that can’t be respawned, nothing gets blown up that can’t be rebuilt, often in minutes. Because of this, all kinds of tactics that if done in real life would be abhorant and probably labeled terroristic in the virtual world are simply a player going for an offensive strategy.

It gets even worse with games that actually involve real role play, and include player-run governments. Plenty of nice, well-adjusted, friendly people in real life like to play evil characters in games, including assassins and other roles that would be labeled terroristic. Indeed, their CHARACTER very well may be known as a terrorist in the game world! After all, if the only evil characters in the game are NPCs, things can get pretty boring… especially if the world is supposed to involve a good amount of player vs player combat. Someone needs to be the bad guy, and game creators usually make sure there’s enough direct appeal to being an evil character that a decent percentage of their players will do so.

A person’s choice of battle tactics, character role, both, etc, say nothing about what that person does in real life. Hell, most people aren’t even consistent. I normally play good characters in RP games, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never roll up a villain here and there for a change of pace.

Of course, the government is fully aware that trying to link in game evil to any real world evil is totally bogus. I highly doubt that’s the goal though. After all, when we stop living in a culture of fear, BS like the Patriot Act will get thrown out, and the US will actually start to go back to the principles it was founded on. There’s nothing the current administration would like to see less. As long as they can throw “orange alerts” and “Oh noes! Online worlds training terrorists!” announcements, enough of the public won’t resist them pissing on the constitution that they’ll be able to do so successfully. It will work only for so long though, and I think at this point that a large enough majority of US citizens will have reached the limits of their BS tolerance VERY SOON that the current irrationality are country is running on is finally going to fade out. Either that, or declaring wars all over the place and running our alliances and our economy into the ground will start another depression, and THAT will give people the reality check they need. Either way, in the long run, sanity will reign over the US again.