Games for Stalkers

I just came across this article:

http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1933-ADD-THIS-FEATURE-Giant-Interactives-Z-Online-hits-1.5-Million-Peak-Concurrent-Users-PCU-Thanks-to-Social-Networking-Feature.html#extended

Z-Online, from Giant Interactive, is amazingly popular in China. As of November of 2007, it was reaching 888,000 Peak Concurrent Users (PCU).

This year, they came up with a feature that brought them to 1.5 Million PCU... its simple, brilliant, and every online game and social network should add it.

The new feature is called "Neighboring Friends" and it allows players to search for other players based on geographic location, according to Pacific Epoch.

My first thought was as a game developer: "Oh sweet! We could put that in and really add to the social networking component of the game! That's brilliant."

My second thought was as a security-conscious person, and was something along the lines of: sinking feeling, OhShitOhShit. Great. Let's let our entire playerbase see where that annoying 14 year griefer old lives. Because that wouldn't get us sued for endangering children.

I notice that while wearing my game developer hat, I look at the world through rose-colored plastic-glitter sunglasses with little pink bows on the earpieces. When I put on my paranoid hat, suddenly the world is dark and menacing and filled with Evil. Since I would really prefer to live in a happy place, it's far more comfortable to wear the game developer hat.

This may start to explain why game developers are, as a group, far less hacker-conscious than one would expect.

Which raises the question: to what nefarious purposes are Giant Interactive's geocoding feature being put, and by whom? Does that endanger its players? And does GI have a responsibility to kill that feature, or at least actively monitor or gate it?