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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."
Some of the tactics used by this researcher remind me of the full court press in basketball. The rules of basketball allow a full court press, yet to do so never crosses the mind of most players. Playing one side of the court at a time is convention. The full court press is extremely effective, yet if you use it, the other team will no doubt call your win "cheap".
Still, when you are the underdog, and must win at all costs, the press is your only option. I sympathize with those who use it (and recognize that it isn't easy to pull off either).
If people complain that a tactic is cheap, it's really not the fault of the player, but the fault of the game. Past slashdot postings are full of examples where players exploited loopholes in city of heroes (remember the article about player-created missions?). With this in mind, I think it's obvious that City of Heroes was poorly designed to begin with. Game designers should never assume players will be on their best behavior.
What seems weird is that he was upset that people were punishing behavior "out of the norm" on one hand, and on the other hand was touting that he was merely following the rules. Huh?
The folks in the game creatively and organically decided to set up their own customs opposed to the rules - Twixt seems more like a street preacher who hates everyone because they don't follow the rules like he does.
Is he a cultural anthropologist (probably not, given that anthropologists are trained to work within the social framework of existing cultures as much as possible)? If not, I'd LOVE to see a cultural anthropologist do a write up on what happened here.
The professor seems surprisingly disappointed by the scorn heaped on his not-mainstream behaviour. He tries to liken it to cliques in high school, but the reality is he didn't just not follow rules, but he actively tried to destroy an existing social fabric and actively molested participants. He tries to paint his behaviour as 'following the rules, but independent' without the most important piece of information 'also, I actively antagonised people.' This is akin to painting himself a geek when really he's a bully (to follow on his high school example)
In the sports world, there are many instances of coaches and players using strategies that, although effective, are bad for the game for one reason or another. Sports leagues that deal with this effectively, like the NBA, are doing OK. Leagues that do not, such as the NHL (sorry Canada), are circling the drain. Once upon a time in basketball, teams started holding the ball for minutes at a time as soon as they got a lead. So, the NBA instituted a shot clock forcing the team to shoot the ball within 24 seconds. As players got taller, coaches started camping 7-footers under the basket. So, a 3-second lane was added to forbid any player from standing under the basket for more than 3 seconds at a time. Years later, the 3-point line was introduced to increase the value of long-range shooting and encourage players not to all crowd around the basket. The NHL started going down the tubes when teams like the New Jersey Devils used the horrendously boring "neutral zone trap" and "clutch-and-grab" defense to win Stanley Cups over more skilled and exciting teams. The NHL waited too long to do something about it, and as a result the Stanley Cup finals are now shown on a basic cable bicycle racing channel. If legal play can ruin the game, the rules need to be changed. Pure and simple. You can't trust the players to "be nice."
The Institute of Incomplete Research has determined that 9 of out 10
It sounds like this "professor" really never learned the details about what he's playing.
In this particular game, player vs. player combat is for the most part consensual. The speed of travel in the game is so fast that the only way to kill someone is for them to be willing to slow down and have a fight to the death. The developers go to greath lengths to minimize the ways in which one player can interfere with other players.
Being killed by a player has no penalty in a PvP zone, you're just sent back to the entrance of the zone. However, the computer controlled "cartoon" enemies in the zone will inflict an experience loss(known as "debt") on the players that die by their hand, and this loss takes a considerable amount of time to mitigate. There are players in this zone who are there to defeat the enemies because they give increased experience, they aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players in any way and are left alone instead.
There's no benefit to winning by dropping the enemy into the computer controlled enemies, since the computer takes the credit for killing him. So essentially, he is disrupting the gameplay of the other players, inflicting a loss of time, and for no personal gain aside from schadenfreude. A classic troll.
He's not bucking social norms, he's being a sociopath as far the game world allows. The results are not suprising, interesting, or even insightful. If he wanted to buck social norms, he should play a healer character who focuses only on his weak offensive abilities. That's the game-equivalent of being a social outcast. He's going for the game-equivalent of Charles Manson.
It's not that your analogy was too complex... it's that it was just flat wrong. Nowhere does it say he was "insulting" anyone. It's like instead of playing basketball, both teams were just standing there chatting about nothing in particular and hogging the public court. He decided to start shooting some hoops, and some moron got hit on the head by the ball because he didn't move. Or perhaps the moron was standing there holding a public basketball that belongs with the court, and he decided to 'steal' the ball and start actually playing. There's plenty of analogies that would fit. Yours was not one.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I find it interesting you say that he 'played the game correctly' since that was the core part of the argument that I thought the professor completely missed in his paper.
Who gets to define the 'correct' way to play? And if we look at the social dynamic of the game world as being larger than merely a 'game', who gets to define the correct way to live life? Can you really do it wrong? Is there anything interesting about that fact that players were put in an environment were they were suppose to compete against one another, and yet collectively choose to cooperate instead?
Certainly, we could make a compelling argument that the game designers and developers are the ones who get to define the 'correct' way to play the game. But I should think an equally compelling argument could also be made that the players also get to make that decision. Or, even, that it is an entirely subjective and personal choice, and not subject to the tyranny of any majority.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Actually, the driver's handbook my state publishes specifically says you should only use the left lane to pass. So when some asshole in a Winnebago camps the passing lane at (speed limit minus 10), he really is breaking the law, or at least driving improperly. Like jaywalking and littering, it's something cops don't really care about, so everyone does it, and most people don't even know it's wrong. And then everyone's surprised when they hear the Germans actually enforce rules like that. Sigh...
From reading his blog post on the matter http://dmyersloyola.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/im-finishing-up-city-of-heroes-today/ he didn't get irb approval. His dismissal of the need for it in the comments makes it seem like he doesn't know much about the ethics of ethnographic research.
I'm also less than impressed with his responses. It doesn't come off as very professional.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players