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Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him
D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO City of Heroes/Villains:
"... he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain 'Syphris.' Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player. Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later. 'If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.' ... As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular. At first, players tried to beat him in the game to make him quit. Myers was too skilled to be run off, however. They then made him an outcast, a World Wide Web pariah that the creator of Syphris — along with hundreds of other faceless gamers — detested."
So, a researcher enters a foreign land. He obeys the strict letter of the law, but ignores the customs and rules of polite behavior. Even more, he specifically sets out to break those customs and rules of polite society. The natives push back, telling him that he is being rude. He continues to break the customs and rules of polite society, offending large numbers of people on a regular basis. The natives seek every legal avenue and socially acceptable method to drive him away. He continues to offend. Some natives start pushing what is social acceptable, and skirting the edges of legality.
Wow, color me surprised. Those nasty natives! How dare they try to keep you down!
Perhaps as followup research he can start referring to people of other ethnicity using racial slurs.
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This summary seemed very biased, cherry picking out sections that made it seem like the Professor played outside of the intended purposes of the game by saying he avoided 'custom sets'. After reading the article it seems to me he played it exactly how anyone who had purchased that game would expect to play it. He chose a side, in his case hero, and set out to do battle against other people who had chosen the side of villian. I am not familiar with the game, but it would seem to me that would be the obvious way in which to play the game and how it was meant. From the article the professor says both heroes and villians sat around chatting and only going against computer opponents, which would seem to sort of defeat the purpose of a game that lets you choose a side and everyone has this choice. I know if I had picked up this game I would be pretty pissed if I started playing it just to realize I was only there to be buddy buddy with everyone no matter their affiliation and only go after those designated as computer threats.
Myers, who bought "City of Heroes" when it hit store shelves in 2004, quickly learned that players ignored the area's stated purpose. Heroes chatted peacefully with villains in the combat zone. Instead of fighting each other, members of the two factions sparred with computer-controlled enemies..
What kind of silly carebear game is this? Try Eve, where the time it takes to rid yourself of such nonsense is measured in the time it takes to warm up a railgun.
Not a typewriter
MMOs are nothing but overglorified IRC clients.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
... in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
If those user-driven rules are so important for the gameplay, they should just pass them along to the developers so they can add them to the actual rules. That's what we in the real world call "Laws". If they don't like the way things are they should go play somewhere else. Stupid whining babies...
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
I don't understand your complaint. There is no question that Twixt broke no rules.. only social convention. Must we all conform to social convention?
...how much government funding he got during the 4 odd years he was "researching" this. Not a bad job to get paid to play a video game for four years and be an utter prick while doing it, while maintaining the rationalization, "it's all for science." Maybe someone should be researching why sociology professors are so willing to live off the public dole like this...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
More like a griefer, which made his antics instant win.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
A player was being irritating, which is within the rules.
The rest of the players turned him into an outcast, which is also within the rules.
I don't see the problem here.
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Not all rules can bet programmed in. For example, camping. You can't make it impossible to camp, but in a lot of games (read: not all) it ruins the fun.
If the admin says no camping/playing cheap on his server, go to a different server, 'stupid whining babies'.
Wow, someone on the Internet said he would kill you! This is a death threat to take seriously, all right.
I weep for higher education. Here we have a man with a Ph.D. and a teaching position, and he doesn't know the first thing about culture. Is he lying when he says he was stunned?
The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture.
Again, how can an educated man be so ignorant? Ah well, I suppose he's like the Ph.D.s at my mom's job - the ones who regularly send her email hoaxes, viruses, and Howard Dean campaign contribution requests.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This guy wasn't doing research, he just wanted a tax write off and a grant to do nothing but sit around and be a dick on the internet.
To be fair, it sounds like a fairly typical breaching experiment but "on the internet". I'm sure there's planty that can be learned about human behavior from this sort of thing except... his claim that he "was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules". Any serious researcher should have been expecting this or if not then at most be intrigued by it. Not stunned. The reactions he got seem to be well in line with what you'd expect from a breaching experiment along these lines. There's nothing new here.
And just as with real-world laws, there's a limit to how much you can specify clearly enough, or how many restrictions you actually want to set.
In fact, I think we'd both agree that it would be a Bad Idea to have all laws be set to match social customs. There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt, and I would not want to live in a place that had such a law -- yet you probably still wouldn't want me to do that, and society in general would probably disapprove.
"Don't be a dick" can't be coded into law, but it's still good advice.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Basically, he played the game (actually fighting villains) and was hated for it. Not because he was being vile or crude (indeed, completely contrary to what you suggest) but by violating game defeating "customs." Why the hell have a city full of heroes and villains, if the villains and heroes just idly chat and don't actually fight each other?
Because people actually like it that way? I mean, who is this self-proclaimed researcher to go around enforcing his vision of how people should play the game with the equivalent of violent force?
Why do you say that going around beating up villains is actually "playing the game" and the people standing around and chatting aren't? Who gets to say what the game actually is? The developers or the people who play it?
In the real world, the people who make the laws of our society are our society's "developers," but the people who actually live in the world, or the "players," often set up unwritten rules. Just because the law says that something is okay, doesn't mean that it really is.
It's like people who go 45 MPH in the left lane on a 55 MPH road. Yeah, that's definitely what the laws say you can do, but most people don't, and the presence of a vehicle going a different speed from the flow of traffic creates danger and stress that shouldn't be there. Ignoring custom in favor of only the rules in print is antisocial behavior.
In terms of the game, the people who play City of Heroes have decided as a community what kind of behavior is acceptable. You only get to go PVP with people who have consented, and the arena is a place for people on other sides of the Heroes / Villains game split to be able to chat otherwise. It's a like a dance club where someone has decided that just because he's a man and you're a woman that he gets to bump and grind against you even if you're not interested. ("That's what dance clubs are for! Why is everyone ganging up on poor little me?")
I won't say that the abusive behavior of some of the angered players was acceptable, but this researcher is a space cadet if he thinks that what he was doing was perfectly kosher and/or commendable or that the reactions to his griefing were surprising. He was using the game's equivalent of violent force to tell people how to play the game and not respecting people when they said that they didn't like playing the way he did. Nobody likes someone who goes around ganking people for "playing wrong."
If he really thinks that the community's reaction to him "marching to the beat of a different drummer" is so horrible, then I wonder what he would think of someone driving by his home at 3:00 AM every night with the bass cranked up. Bold iconoclast? Or someone that he wished the cops would deal with?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
one of the reasons why there will never be a true Democracy. The elite in every society tells the commoner and new initiate what to think, and for the most part they fall in line.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
and writes book describing why it's ok to be a Griefer.
More surprising to me was that in CoH/V PvP is not played as described. I play WoW, on both PvP and carebear servers, and boy do I get ganked whenever I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no such "polite agreement" between Ally and Horde in WoW. How did one get established in CoH/V?
And while it does indeed suck to get griefed and ganked by the opposing forces, esp when I am no threat to them, if it starts bothering me much I just go do something else for awhile. The Alliance can't be roaming Tarren Mill all of the time? Can they? But it seems like I did have to log in in the Early AM Server Time in order to complete some of those quests.
--
$tar -xvf
Laws? Kicking over a kid's sand castle isn't illegal, but people will hate you for it. I'm not sure what your point is here.
The individual. How the fuck can you play baseball with only one person?
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
It's not a "society", it's a game.
In real society, people do things you won't like all the time, and they are still "within the rules". Get used to it. YOu don't get to threaten their life.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
He had been playing since the game came out in 2004. He knew the customs, he knew the rules. He played the game as designed. He was a hero who defeated villains in a PvP server. He played the game correctly, while everyone else wasn't.
How is teleporting people in front of NPC bots designed to enforce a safe zone instead of beating someone up yourself "playing correctly?" Especially when he was attacking people who didn't want to PVP by abusing a mechanism intended to protect people who didn't want to PVP?
The only reason he was "unbeatable" was because he built a character optimized to exploit a cheap trick that didn't rely on his own strength. I mean, he talks himself up as being skilled, but the truth is a little less flattering. Plus, he wasn't as nice and innocently curious of a guy as he pretends to be. An AC below notes that he would taunt people, post bragging kill logs, etc.
He was a griefer who basically bemoans how "haters gotta be hatin'." What a chump.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
He's a "media professor".
After reading the article it seems like he was a griefer who wrote a paper to justify being an asshole. He's "dismayed" and "disturbed" by behavior any anthro 101 student could have predicted from the start. Behavior that would seem like a perfectly natural response to his actions in the "real world".
tl;dr version of his paper: "assholes shunned online as in RL. WTF?"
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Wow, I'm not sure which is worse - the fact that what he is getting reviled for doing *exactly* the point of the game (heroes and villians, think about it), or that you looked at the evidence and somehow concluded that he was doing it because he wanted to "be a dick on the internet." Sounds to me like he was playing the damn game. He wasn't even talking trash, for crying out loud! Sure, nobody personally likes the guy that kills them in a game, but the correct response is to try and kill him right back (in game), not whine, make insults, or send real-life threats.
The equivalent "next research project" would be going down to the bus station with a wanted list from the police, and calling the cops whenever he sees somebody on that list. Sure, that person might not have done anything to him personally, but they chose a "side" of society that... you know, this whole analogy is absurd. It's a goddamn PvP game, the objective being to pit player against player. Do you play CounterStrike by any chance? I suggest next time you play as one of the terrorists, you try sitting down for a chat with one of your opponents, and maybe suggest seeing who can throw a grenade the furthest (but not *AT* one another, of course!) You might get a "LOL!!" before he shoots you in the face. Probably only after, though. Quite a bunch of dicks, though counter-terrorists, aren't they!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The game itself is broken, then. Why the hell can you teleport somebody like that in that case?
I actually still find the other player's responses interesting. Instead of trying to use the same (obviously highly effective) tactic against this guy, or forming groups so that he can't do it to thim without dying as well, they're sitting back and whining, name-calling, and sending RL threats (easily enough to get you permabanned in most games).
Mind you, I've no interest in actually playing this game - the way you describe it, the designers must be absolutely retarded to actually permit this strategy - but I do find it interesting, from a societal point of view, that these people would choose to play a game wherin these tactics are possible, but get so very upset (as opposed to simply playing along, either by countering him somehow or replying in kind) when they are used.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
That's meaningless, the programmed rules of the game are analagous to the laws of physics. Just because you can punch someone on the nose doesn't mean that you should, or that they should just shrug their shoulders and go "well, physics allows it, so I'm ok with it"
FGD 135
Were I faculty at Loyola, I would find the IRB members who approved this and give them a very hard time, as this is not the kind of research I would want to be associated with. If he has done this without IRB support, I would ask that he be removed from the faculty.
I would point to his academic themed blog (linked to in the article), where he seems to go out of his way to belittle and further antagonize the non-academics who are complaining (he had a separate blog "in character" for his research, this is his "serious academic" blog). His response to an inquiry about the ethics of what he has done is to link to a discussion of similar researchers who seem to reach a conclusion that the ethics in MMO social research are complicated and suggests that transparency and respect of the other players is the best policy (in other words, he links to a blog that suggests he has acted unethically). That he is acting "in character" in his academic blog after the conclusion of the research and is not adhering to the "normal" research conduct of his field is, to me, totally unacceptable.
The COH developers have addressed previous griefing techniques, such as teleporting other players into locations they could not exit, heroes camping the inside of the villain hospital, etc. However, griefers are inventive, and sometimes find new tactics faster than the developers can program ways to prevent them.
Also, just because it's possible to PvP with anyone there doesn't mean that people have consented to PvP with you.
Try telling that to some player pirates in EVE.
Actually I think he just proved Professor Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and thereby proving conclusively that no matter how much education or degrees you have attached to you name, you can still be a giant douche on the Internet.
So congratulations Mr Researcher, on proving what everyone else has known since AOHell let the great unwashed loose on the net. I'm sure his next paper will be on how 4Chan is full of trolls that do everything for something called the "LULZ".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
How do you measure the punishment for something you can't measure the crime in?
It also is not "cheap" in terms of energy expended for the defensive team, and has a certain level of risk -- if the offense breaks the press and gets across halfcourt, the odds are pretty good they'll be able to get a quick and easy basket. It's a worthwhile strategy when used when necessary or as a non-routine variation that forces the other team to adapt. Do it all the time and the other team will adapt tactics (and personnel) to counter.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
This is a clearly marked PVP zone, in a game where everyone is on one side or the other and they are supposed to be constantly at war. If you want a farm a zone like that you do it at your own risk, and getting butthurt because someone on the other team was actually playing their character is just absurd and pathetic.
The same kind of idiocy this researcher found in this game definitely goes back a long ways though. I remember encountering it in MUDs way back in the 80s, and the cross-teaming that killed Everquest race-war pvp comes from the same source conceptually as well. These are players with no interest or appreciation for the game at all, who enjoy destroying it for others while chatting with their "friends" on the other side (who should be their mortal enemies) instead of actually playing.
No sympathy for them at all. IMOP they are deserving of the "griefer" epithet, not him.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
He claims to have done an experiment, yet from what I can see, he's tried a grand total of ONE behaviour.
Maybe all players treat everyone like they're an asshole, maybe it wasn't the killing itself, but the obnoxious bragging about it that got people riled.
Maybe it was the color of his pants, or the time of year, or maybe he did something outside of the game itself to bring it on.
And no statement from the developers of the game that what he was doing was how they "intended" the game to be played.
How can he possibly draw valid conclusions from this?
http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html
Sirlin's essay is correct insofar as it goes, but it ignores 75% of the categories of play. Scrubs are only scrubs if they are applying their socially constructed rules in the Fiero space. Socially constructed rules are normal and expected in the other three play types.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
"Must we all conform to social convention?"
only if you want to be one of the cool kids who everybody gets along with. independant thinkers should be ridiculed for their non-conformity if the social convention where you are is to fart during a meal as a sign of approval of the meal you'd better stress that rectum into belching out some noxious gasses...
in all seriousness though... fuck socialism. A democratic society is one where you have freedom... this guy went into an online game and did what the game was designed for... heroes fighting villains, he broke no rules, he just pissed off a bunch of idiots that thought "heroes vs villians, that sounds like an interesting place to hang out and chat about shit"...
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
That and that "tyranny of the majority" thing.
I think the issue is in some people seeing it as a separate world/community and some seeing it as a game within our own real world/community.
This researcher was being a complete asshole, harassing people and ruining the game for easily dozens of people, in front of hundreds of others. How is that different than a guy who goes down to a park and starts knocking over people's chess boards? Revealing the end of movies outside of a theater, maybe going inside and shouting and being an ass during the movie? All the while, he's trash talking the people he's harrassing.
In the real world, people like that get the shit beat out of them (that is, something illegal being done to them for their [questionably] legal acts) and nobody would be at all surprised. Well, he's in THE REAL WORLD. Just because he's sitting in front of a computer doesn't mean he's in some magical place that is no longer reality. He's surprised at -threats-?
This research is absolutely useless, reveals nothing at all, and was an excuse for him to be an asshole while playing his favorite video game. This guy shouldn't even have a job, much less a degree.
fuck it, i have to post again, your post is just ridiculous.
first off, a griever is someone who causes grieve by interrupting gameplay in an unintended way, griever != whiner, please at least get your mmorpg slang right.
i have played eq, and cross teaming has absolutely nothing to do with this, you're not able to team up with anyone of the opposite faction in cox (only in cooperation zones, but we're talking pvp areas here), you can't heal them etc. i am repeating myself, people in those zones are playing as intended, they are pvping, they are fighting each other with some ooc text in between. twixt is essentially doing what fansy did in eq1, are you getting it now?
the anti-twixt folks were the griefers, you should RTFA
I did read the article. Some people used out of game methods to get back at him since his character was too powerful in game. Since your stuck in "RP is All" mode isn't it common practice that the villians would resort to defaming a 'hero' if they can't beat them? In any case, he reaped what he sowed, nothing more, nothing less. Role playing as a blood thirsty 'hero' doesn't absolve him of being an ass.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Sigh. I wish people would quit saying it's the point of the game to PvP versus the opposite faction. You obviously haven't played City of Heroes or City of Villains, have you?
Let me enlighten you. Yes, as a hero you go around defeating villains, and as a villain you go around defeating heroes. However, these are *all* NPC heroes and villains. While you can level inside PvP zones, actual PvP does not advance your character. Why is this, you ask?
It's because PvP in CoH and CoV is terribly broken. Horribly unbalanced. Not the kind of "unbalanced" people complain about in WoW where people get whipped up into a frenzy over a "nerf" that reduces their characters damage by 5%. I mean irretrievably, unarguably broken in a fundamental way. The problem is the power sets in CoX are too extreme to interact with eachother in a sane and balanced way when they're built to PvP. So the developers have basically abandoned PvP as a serious pastime for the players.
This isn't to say you can't show up, brawl a little, and have fun. That's largely what people do, in fact. It's really what the PvP zones are used for... people want something a little different, so they pop over to a PvP zone and fiddle around a bit. It's not serious PvP, as serious PvP hasn't been part of CoX in ages. What we ended up with was often people conducting polite skirmishes and duels.
So, enter a professor whose expressed purpose is to do everything he can to piss off people in the area, including talking trash (which you say he wasn't... but a little research shows he was... a lot), exploiting game mechanics for insta-kills, and being a general ass. Of course he'll get a bad reception. It's obviously what he was LOOKING FOR.
Just to reiterate, despite what the article says CoX is NOT about killing PCs of the opposite faction. It's almost exclusively "player versus environment" and the PvP areas are really just a side-show. One where this sort of behavior is quite inappropriate.
The entrance to every zone in COH/COV is an area protected by police robots. The robots have rays that instantly kill anything in the game. The purpose of this is to prevent anyone from greifing people who are in the process of entering the area and don't have control of their characters yet.
If it weren't for these robots, then greifers could drag powerful mobs into the entrance area, or in the PvP area just stand in the enemy entrance area with a buddy or two, and prevent anyone from being able to enter without getting killed before having a chance to fight back at all.
There's also a "teleport foe" skill you can take, which is very handy for pulling, or for when an enemy gets stuck in a wall.
What this guy appeared to be doing was going into the PvP area and using teleport foe to teleport players on the other side into his own insta-death protected entrance area.
It is a very clever way to use the dev's griefer protection tools to grief people. What is most certianly is not is "playing the game by the designer's rules".
If you've ever had a conversation with a game griefer where they dumped their rationalizations for their prickish behavior on you, this article will look very familiar to you.