The online world and video game communities truly are insane sometimes. The amount of time, commitment, and photo shopped pictures that surge the internet every day edges on the border of weird to the point of an obsessive compulsive movie star stalker. The way that this digital world is clashing with the real world sometimes creates a combination more confusing then Japanese television commercials. So every so often, you will find me here, highlighting a few stories and trying to make sense of it all.
Ah, China. Where better to start then with the king of weird-o internet info. Whether it be from wrapping the Undead in flesh or real-life hobbit villages, China is right in the fore-front of digital strangeness. They have also been known to have a problem with internet addiction. So bad in fact, that they have many camps where people are shipped to too try and cure their need to digg stuff, twitter things, and farm gold in WoW. 
Well, until recently, physical abuse was a perfectly acceptable form of treatment for internet addiction. Mind you, consideration for internet addiction is 6 or more hours of being online a day and little to no interest in school… Odd, that seems to be describing pretty much every nerd in existence!
The goal of the programs are to limit the use of the internet to healthy levels, which may not necessarily be a bad thing all things considering. But looking at all the types of work, life, and entertainment that stem from the internet these days, it seems to imply that hours of use at a time is a bad thing… Well, what if it’s earning you bucks, fame, and your own internet meme? Luckily for our Chinese geek-brethren, China’s Ministry of Health has officially banned physical abuse in the treatments, hopefully realizing that slapping someone when they are twittering too much isn’t an effective way to stop them from twittering. (Trust me, I’ve tried)
In almost a polar opposite of physical abuse, a school in England is offering overweight children (see above) who don’t want to exercise, a six week “Wii Course.” The class consists of playing Wii Fit and using the balance board, but of course, those who enroll in the classes must “promise to spend a proportion of their PE lessons outside playing traditional games.” Well, it sounds like I’m going to encourage the eating of donuts to my future children, as they will get offered much cooler classes then the slim kids.
Our last story of crazy is Evony’s marketing campaigns. We’ve talked about Evony before in a review and the decision to try and sell their game by using pictures of scantly clad women. If you’re not familiar, Evony is a browser-based strategy war game, much like Sid Meier’s Civilization but multi-player and online. They’re marketing is still up to it’s old tricks, with their latest ad (see right) using a prop picture that is on the cover of a pornographic movie. PC World did a little research, and found that although the girls on the picture are not actually porn-stars, they are from a stock photo that was used on the case of the movie. Seriously?
They make the game seem like it’s some hidden taboo, with words on their ads like, “You can play discreetly.” Discreetly? So, I need to hide the fact that I play a game about managing a city and conquering my enemies? I don’t remember locking my door and desperately trying to keep my parents out of my room while I played Sim City. We’re not talking some weird taboo fetish here, it’s a browser game! Since they seem so persistent in continuing advertising things like this, it begs the question, is it working? Certainly sex DOES sell, but when related to something completely irrelevant? Probably. I mean, look at Lowrider magazine. Wait, I think we’re onto something here… Evony is like the Lowrider magazine of strategy browser games!
Whether it be risque game advertisements, substituting P.E. for games, or computer-lovin’ Chinese teenagers, gaming truly has had an incredibly… weird… impact on our world. Stay tuned, the interwebz hasn’t let us down yet, and there’s sure to be more head-scratching oddball nonsense in the future! And of course, drop a line, let us know what you think!
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Great article Acea. If it makes you feel better, whenever I even hear the word “twitter” it makes me lash out and slap the person nearest me. It’s a nervous tick I guess. >.<
Wait wait wait a cotton-pickin’ minute. You mean to tell me that the porn stars in that ad are FAKE? What a ripoff, man!
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee