In an earlier post I commented on how virtual objects could be coded to do things you don’t expect an object to do in real life. Well, here’s a great example (with some corrected punctuation and spelling) from the Second Life forum:
A girl came onto my land and offered to give me a blackjack table. I took it and put it out the table. It asked for permission to take money like all the other games do. I said “yes” to it and we played a few hands. She won then I won etc. Then the table paid her 10,000 lindens. I grabbed the table real quick.
Imagine going into a Las Vegas casino and literally having a conversation with the blackjack table. And during that conversation, you tell the table all your personal information – from your name to your bank account number and password. Then imagine the table wipes your account and wires the money to its creator. That’s what happened here; costing the unsuspecting owner of the turncoat object about US$40 – real money. This could become a classic example.
CSven, forgive me repeating an anecdote that a friend posted on my blog:
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Following excerpt from the June 15, 1999 Defence Science and Technology Organisation Lecture Series in Melbourne, Australia.
“The reuse of some object-oriented code has caused tactical headaches for Australia’s armed forces.
As virtual reality simulators assume larger roles in helicopter combat training, programmers have gone to great lengths to increase the realism of the their scenarios, including detailed landscapes and, in the case of the Northern Territory’s Operation Phoenix, herds of kangaroos (since disturbed animals might well give away a helicopter’s position). The head of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation’s Land Operations Simulations Division instructed developers to model the local marsupials’ movements and reaction to helicopters. Being efficient programmers, they just re-appropriated some code originally used to model the reactions of infantry detachments under the same stimuli, changed the mapped icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the figures’ speed of movement.
Eager to demonstrate their flying skills for some visiting American pilots, the hotshot Aussies “buzzed” the virtual kangaroos in low flight during a simulation. The kangaroos scattered, as predicted, and the Americans nodded appreciatively … then did a double-take as the kangaroos reappeared from behind a hill and launched a barrage of Stinger SAM missiles at the hapless helicopter. Apparently the programmers had forgotten to remove that part of the infantry coding.
The lesson? Objects are defined with certain attributes, and any new object defined in terms of the old one inherits all the attributes. The embarrassed programmers had learned to be careful when reusing object-oriented code, and the Yanks left with the utmost respect for the Australian wildlife.
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This is another good example, though in this case it wasn’t deliberate or sinister. But I think your point is tht the ‘rules’ we have painstakingly internalised over thousands of years (tables don’t cheat you, kangaroos don’t shoot missiles) just don’t exist in the simulated world. The only rules that they obey are the ones someone coded in. With OO programmes in particular, you can find yourself re-using or subclassing objects you have never inspected and don’t understand.
That’s hilarious. Thanks for passing that on.
Exactly my point. When the simulation is sufficiently able to suspend disbelief such that people treat it like the real thing, our internalized rules can sometimes throw us for the biggest loops. I suspect the most profound disconnects are actually the subtle ones; “rules” of life that most people don’t even notice on a day-to-day basis, but which catch us the most off-guard.