Slashdot Mirror
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."
That's trivially true, of course, but the premise of a make-believe world is that is it different from 'real life' in some important way. Isn't this why people participate in them? But if this person's experience turns out to hold for other make-believe environments, maybe the answer is more complex than that.
I am puzzled that he was so surprised at the outcomes of his actions. Feel free to pass it off as some sort of experiment if you like, but it seemed like he was using almost exploitative techniques to kill people. Couple that with the fact that he just stormed into a room and started killing people -- most folks, being the social creatures they are, do a little bit of social reconnaissance before they start to act. It seems he had already observed the social conventions in the room and made a butthead character to antagonize them -- why did he find it so shocking that people reacted negatively?
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!