Trouble in Alphaville City

There is apparently trouble in cyberspace. More directly there are problem with the cyberspace game Sims online which is owned by Electronic Arts.
The game is a massive multi player real time game which is a direct descendant of the game Megawars 3 which I have written about here before.
Drudge Report highlights this article about a Professor who was playing and documented the various practices going on in Alphaville, which is the name of the town in the game,

As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature

There are articles about the problems here and here.

More in the extended entry,

This is no surprise to me since in MW3 which did not have the numbers or as much latitude for the players to operate under we saw the same type of behavior 15 or more years ago. My first introduction to MW3 was an article where the writer had wandered into the game and not knowing much had been repeatedly killed off by experienced players who knew what they were doing.

Later when Kesmai introduced a D&D type role play named Islands of Kesmai which gave the players more options there were lots of players who enjoyed playing the game by killing off new players who did not have their skills and could not fight back.

In Everquest which is even a bigger game than Sims (somewhere between 400,000 and 650,000 vs. Sims 80,000) the same problem exists. My daughter, who had never met a game she didn't like, gave up on Everquest during the trial period because she was always getting killed.

In MW3 and later in IOK the game operators tried to prevent this by game changes that restricted the players and what they could do but eventually ways were found around most things.
EA is now going down that same road and since a lot of what seems to be goign on includes forms of cybersex I say it is long past due.

Electronic Arts by a strange twist of fate is now the owner of all the source code for those old games but refuses to release new versions or sell the source to others who would like to release new versions.

Things are likely to get worse before they get better.

An online adults-only game called Sociolotron, now under development, will embrace behavior that's supposed to be illegal in the Sims Online. Players will be encouraged to act out fantasies of prostitution, drug dealing, and sexual fetishes

I am willing to bet that they will not able to keep non adults out and even if they do adults can be pretty replusive sometimes.