Sorry for the provocative headline. Gamers aren’t terrorists. But I wanted to play a bit with an amusing line of thought; at most, it would only refer properly to “powergamers”. Though, in fact, you could define many kinds of behaviours as powergaming, including, by the way, market speculation.
So, ok, consider this: all games give you a ‘play again’ option. That’s basically the equivalent of the “you will be born again, in a (perhaps) better life”. As you may have observed in multiplayer games if you ever played any, the lack of unrecoverable losses often acts as a responsability relief for gamers. Thievery, verbal hate, violence, tyranny of the powerful and insane accumulation of wealth are done in the happiest of the moods since, when they turn against them, their losses won’t be unrepairable and can be recovered by further application of the same strategy.
If you think about it, a terrorist is usually someone with a strategy of hate and violence whose self-responsabilty has been relieved by the promise of being reinstated as a “winner” within an ideal order (either real or metaphysical). So, in their own mind, a terrorist is playing a game where you can just “insert coin” if you lose. Gamers look often convinced that, if they play again, that time they’ll have better luck. They won’t find any good reason to not keep banging the game mechanics with the same strategy again and again until they are given the jackpot (the fact that, well, that behaviour can get them killed or imprisoned is overriden by the confidence in the reality-rules cheating God-Mode as last resort).
The key point, perhaps, is when the belief that, given enough tries, they will become the most mega-super-awesome player ever, prompts them to force shortcuts to their expected outcome by anticipating it. Like, for example, when rule cheating is viewed as a way to make the game acknowledge faster their “inevitable awesomeness” (which includes using violence against anyone who “stubbornly” refuses to reckon how awesome they are). They don’t see how that invalidates anything they may achieve because they think they are already going to achieve it, so since they are “already” awesome, anything that subverts that is seen as a violent action against them and not a reaction againt their violence. Powergamers at their peak are very sensitive against new regulations, they’ll claim that they are an attack against them, not a defense from their cheating and abusing the mechanics.
But, before you get drawn beyond what is just a line of thought exploration, I must say that I’m quite sure there aren’t real chances of a powergamer turning into a real world terrorist. Real world rules are complex and therefore you’ll need something aditional to make them ’simpler’ (like, money, religious beliefs or boundaries as the snake oil for utopia). Actually, by setting a stage for “virtual terrorism”, games are probably showing people how the outcome of powergaming isn’t so awesome. As in the Prisoner’s Dillema, the ‘absolute evil’ strategy looks the best only before it’s heavily played in a competitive enviroment; otherwise the ‘built-up trust’ strategy always ends making the best outcome of the game without suffering of big weaknesses.
If we really had to find a disadvantage, we could, perhaps, argue that getting trained in games where responsability is relieved could be making people feel more easy about being “peaceful terrorists”, as in bending reciprocal rules to their self interest, using hate speech and threating opposers with social/economical exclusion, as long as there’s no prospect of that prompting any violence, or causing back social/economical exclusion to them. But I’m not sure I would be able of finding proper examples of that. Apart of neocons and internet trolls, I mean.
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