f13.net

College Professor griefs players in an MMO (http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html) and is shocked, SHOCKED to discover that this behavior makes him unpopular.

There are so many comments I can make on this.  On the micro level, the article linked above highly distorts exactly what Twixt did in game.  The paper linked in the article is a bit more honest but is noteworthy for the omissions.  Myers transferred one of his Twixt characters to Virtue at one point so I have first hand knowledge of exactly what he did in game.  If anyone is interested I can go into detail there, but for now suffice it to say that Myers was much more active in antagonizing people and goading them into angry responses than is implied in both the article and the paper.  Both also make no mention of the fact that some of Myers' 'legal' game play would result in quite a bit of exp debt to the victim.

On the macro level, I don't believe for a second that Myers could actually be surprised at the reactions he got from his behavior in game.  Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical.  He takes advantage of poor yet legal game mechanics to grief other players and ends up ostracized.  Obvious conclusion is obvious?  As to the degree of venom directed at him on message forums, do I really need to link the Penny Arcade strip we've all seen a thousand times before?  And I'm pretty sure neither Tycho nor Gabe needed a PhD to figure that one out.

That article makes it sound the guy had the nerve to actually fight other people in PvP-enabled zone much to their dismay. Which makes the "universally hated" reaction quite amusing, so what was it that he's really done beyond that, that stirred the nest so much?

There was an unwritten rule that you weren't supposed to use teleport enemy to suck people into the NPC guards at the zone points as I recall, I think that is what the article is talking about. My understanding is that the article significantly undersells the amount of trolling behavior that went along with it though.

All of the 'stunned by the reaction' is completely faked.

He went out of his way to avoid social norms and do things entirely to win that the locals looked down on. No study is required to expect derision from the locals.

I'm also amused that he looks upon this study as a "bad high school experience", not understanding that in this case, he was the bully, and reviled for it.


Outside video games, we call it "sportsmanship" and we pretty much look down on people who don't practice it in normal games, either. But the entire article seems like he's either faking his surprise at the results, or he's an absolute fool.

There's been coverage of Myers' work before. I'm tempted to say more. I think at least that his work doesn't strike me as being very much in dialogue with established scholarship on griefing and cheating.

What a fucking retard.


Uhhhh... no shit, Sherlock? It's a community. Just because it's digitally delivered doesn't mean it acts any different to any other community on the face of the planet. He should walk into a support group and shit on the floor every time they meet. I bet they'd react a lot better than an MMOG community.

I think his point was, if its unwritten, there is no rule.

PvP happened, within the developers defined rules. and people hated him for it.

I find it quite interesting.

At least some of the "shocked, shocked" thing is coming from the angle that the reporter is playing...if you read Myers' published work, he went into this with a self-conscious understanding of the likely social consequences. A bit of this is also mugging for the camera, e.g., using his own experience as data requires that he accentuate and exaggerate some of his own responses.

His upcoming study will be going to AA meetings with a six pack and discussing the pros of inebriation. He will be shocked by the unexpected results.

The game mechanics allow you to do things that are considered violations of the EULA. I.e. the game mechanics themselves can not enforce acceptable behavior.

And anyone who has experienced any sort of MMO anywhere knows that once it's released, the community makes up its own rules and mores and gets mighty pissed off when you break those unwritten rules. Just because he wasn't banned for it doesn't mean he should have expected people to cheer him on.

Or, obvious research is obvious.

It's really not that interesting, even in a "virtual worlds and their influence on normal human reactions" manner. How many sports figures play entirely in the rules, but are absolute douchebags about it? They're HATED. Why? Because it's a fun yet competitive game, in which there are hard rules to gameplay, and soft rules of etiquette. This isn't unique to virtual interactions, it's a byproduct of any social group forming.

Heck, the same thing applies to driving (there are a LOT of dick moves you can pull on the road and still be entirely within the law), standing in line waiting for things, or even holding doors for little old ladies. There's no law saying I can't slam doors in little old lady faces, but I'm being a total dick if I do it.

edit: the entire study smells like someone who LIKES being a douchebag in public, and is trying to make a case for why it should be accepted/cheered on because the law doesn't say you can't be a dick. He's completely railing against the idea of social consequences to actions.

That's exactly what he was doing, yes.  
The article kind of glosses it over, but the paper goes into more detail about what he was doing.  For those not familiar with City of Heroes, I'll provide an example using WoW.

Imagine a Death Knight's ability Death Grip, only with literally 10 times the range (Teleport Foe in CoX could be slotted for range and potentially have a range that reached beyond draw distance) and a recharge time of around 5 to 10 seconds.  Now imagine that each side in a WoW battleground had a respawn point protected by unkillable NPCs that would instantly one-hit kill any player from the opposing side that gets too close to it.  Now imagine that DK would do nothing but stand next to that NPC and deathgrip players to it over and over and over again, while constantly exclaiming in broadcast about how awesome he is.  That was Twixt the majority of the time when he was in zone.

The rest of the time, when there were only a small handful of Villains in zone, he'd actually leave the base and engage in the same tactic only this time instead of TPing them into the drones he'd use the large number of faction NPCs that inhabit the zones to kill other players.  One of the many flaws in CoX pvp zones is there are a very large number of faction NPCs in the zone.  These won't one-hit kill you like a drone will, but given their number unless you're a Tank it's likely you'll die if you suddenly appear in the middle of a group of them.  Unlike drones, faction NPCs will give you XP debt if you die to them, just like if you died in PvE.  One of my favorite tactics during Twixt's brief stay on Virtue was to follow him around invisibly and wait for him to set up in a large group of Longbow (Hero faction NPCs) and then mass confuse the whole group so they'd all turn to attack him.  Oddly enough, that didn't make it into the article.  :grin:

Edit: by the way, one of the bigger complaints about his tactic was that it really isn't 'PvP' if all you're doing is taking advantage of poor mechanics to allow NPCs to kill the target.  It's less 'PvP' and more 'non-consentual forced PvE'.

That's not really why people hated him for it. He was given lots of second chances and opportunities to not be a dick, which he passed on. He was the MMO equivalent of one of those forum trolls who skirts just along the edges of the rules, just enough to keep from being banned.

If he had just been going about his business and hadn't compounded it by trolling people in chat, etc., then he wouldn't have anything to write about.

And now we present:  this shit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism).

Why the fuck people 'study' online gamer's behavior is beyond me.  What a fucking pointless endeavor.  The only reason to understand fucktards like us is if you're marketing to us.  And I mean, come on.  The research has pretty much figured out what we're up to by now.  It occurs to me that this was less of a study, and more of a good time pwning noobs.

Also.

Go good team?

Was he Fansy the Bard?

This is really what he was doing, only you couldn't even dismiss the victims as 'noobs' since at the time there were very few ways you could avoid being TPed.  It was literally a one button tactic.  He didn't even get credit for the kills since it was the drones/Longbow who actually got the kill.  So in that sense he wasn't even playing by the 'rules' since he'd never gain any Reputation (CoX's 'honor').

It's also very interesting that his 'study' came to an end not long before CoX pvp went through a complete overhaul.

I can see some merit to the presented complaints. At the same time though, i'm afraid the idea of computer game villains crying big, buttery tears a "hero" wouldn't fight them 'fair and square and gentleman-like' and how he should get aids and cancer in rl for that is just too funny and prevents me from taking the whole thing seriously  :why_so_serious:

edit: on slightly more serious note, shit like that probably ain't helping in the slightest the motion having PvP in one's MMO is worth the extra trouble it brings...

"Tech news" is so fucking incestuous. I've seen this idiot's article in half a dozen different places which is ridiculous because anyone with half a brain can read the article and go "ya, this guy acted outside of the norm of a social group and was punished for it. Obvious result is obvious. Also, he's a douchebag". Good for him, I guess. Free advertising.

what an amateur

It seems to me that he was basically exploiting, and the Devs where unwilling to put in a fix, which by some peoples standards means its "OK". I think I would be right there along with the rest of the people being pissed at him.

The fact that he is SHOCKED just makes me laugh. I think anyof us here could have predicted the outcome in about 5 seconds flat.

If you wanted to grief a game, COX would be a very good candidate. When not cybering in Pocket D, people in the game are nice, and it has a decent community. And while it may not be a stereotype of roleplaying with full character discussions, in a meta-sense, I think most people there are roleplaying a hero or a villain and more or less staying within the logical bounds of the game setting, not just the actual rules/limitation of the client.

Jesus, what the hell is a game engine for then?

Just stop stupid things like this from being possible. Don't let TP Enemy deposit players wihtinin guard aggro radius.

It is funny to note that the reason Longbow are positioned where they are to begin with is because the devs know you cannot trust any "convention" or "honor" not to approach the other side's starting spots. There's the tacit acknoledgement right there that you need hard implementations to support hard rules.

Otherwise we'd all be playing Darkfail and loving it.

My urge to sign up just grew by leaps and bounds.  Have they fixed this mechanic yet?

I read the shocked, as "Shocked people would jump outside of the game and threaten outside of the games context".

Seems like he was playing a game, and everyone else was shocked someone was interrupting their life.

Wasn't someone here recently talking about how they disagreed with a AOC developer saying you spend 90% of your time stopping players from doing certain things?

I forget the specifics, but his behavior reminds me a little of the bard in Everquest that would run around training 15 Sand Giants onto people day and night.  I think he pretty much got the same response.  Its interesting to me that in both cases, despite what would probably be overwhelming public outrage, the Designers did not consider it game-breaking enough to immediately insert some sort of fix.

It's pvp as usual really. If you don't like it, you really won't enjoy pvp because you can't enforce any soft rules that lack code to back them. That s the long and short of it all.

I read the article, chuckled at his surprise over being outed as a douche, and moved on. Not much to talk about really. :)

Fansy.  I said that.

Actually, in Fansy's case, they changed the rules of the 'no rules' pvp server in direct response to him.  And I think Fansy was thought of well by those on his side, because his side was vastly outnumbered and they essentially couldn't even go to the Deserts of Ro or Oasis.

Kinda, I believe. It still can be done, but it isn't as easy to do as it was with Twixt.

Yup. And there were others that did similar things to Fansy but they weren't as notorious. E.g. there was a Bard named "Worry" that used to train dragons and whatnot onto the other side (go go Selo's! :awesome_for_real:).

There were defenses against being teleported into drones if you ran a balanced group.  During zone PVP one side or the other would eventually drive the losing faction back to their base, and then camp it just out of guard range. Pulling people in, or out, was a valid tactic to break the camping cycle and get back into the zone.

I remember requesting multiple entrance points to the zones so that base camping would be harder to do in CoV, and I also remember making those comments several times for Warhammer feedback. I like PVP zones, but to prevent camping there needs to be multiple entrances or respawn points or you have to use powers like TP foe, stealth, etc to break out.  When people can't break out, they just leave the zone and then you have a dead PVP zone.

This.  If teleport foe has a range a bit longer than a normal ranged attack, then the ONLY people you can pull to instakill guards are people CAMPING THE OTHER SIDE'S SPAWN.  He killed some campers?  Bravo for him. 

It seems to me he intentionally pushed the boundaries of ethical behaviour to see how closely attached people get to virtual objects or situations, I genuinely believe this was a case study and an interesting one. Ok most people are saying it was obvious why bother, but in order to do a case study you need to experience it first hand, and then document it, right?!


I dunno man I think if he was here he could probably add you to his case study.

It has quite a bit more range than a normal ranged attack.  The base range of Teleport Foe is 200 yards.  That exceeds even the long range snipe powers.  Your standard ranged attack will have a base range of 80 yards, most snipes are 150 with a couple at 175.  The enhancements you can add to powers to improve them work on a percentage basis so the advantage the teleport has becomes even more extreme as the powers are enhanced.

Part of the 'mini game' of the RV zone that Myers claimed to be participating in is the capture of the various pillboxes to temporarily capture the zone.  One of those pillboxes is well within the range that a Hero can drone a villain trying to capture it.  None of the pillboxes was close enough to the villain base to do that.  The only way you could capture that pillbox if there was a dedicated droner at the hero base was if you were lucky enough to have a buff that negated TPing.  While a pre-made group could make sure to have that buff available, the zones were largely made up of pick-up groups and Increase Density was generally not a commonly taken power.  Pre-made groups usually stuck to the arenas, as they didn't like the interference of all the NPCs in the zones.  I hear pre-mades were more common on Freedom, though.  As for camping, it's actually impossible to camp the bases in RV because it's the only zone that actually has a couple of alternate exits from the base.

I realize it's easy to read the article and wonder what the problem is when this guy was just 'playing by the rules', but in the context of the game he was exploiting flaws in the game design specifically to grief people.  'But it's allowed by the game' is always the very first excuse given by any griefer to justify their anti-social behavior.

Professor creates Superbadass villain in a game about Heroes and Villains and this is a bad thing? You got it all mixed up here that's what MMO's should be about, if people want to take on evil personas in a virtual world more the fucking power to them. I mean he's probably never even robbed a pen from the stationery room.

Amarr, I think he created a Superbadass Hero and played it like a total dickhead. Wrong faction, and all that.

The whole piece smacks of hypocrisy. Being an asshole in the game is within the rules, but being an asshole on message boards is also within the rules. So why is he complaining?

His philosophy of "if it's in the game it's in the game" seems to be applied in highly-selective fashion.

Hey nearly all superheroes have turned bad at some stage so that's just a minor quibble  :awesome_for_real:

I've always wished more games incorporated teleportation as an offensive power.  WoW world PvP would be much more exciting if you could mark a spot in a cave full of elites, and then teleport an opponent there when you are both on another continent  :why_so_serious:

TP Foe has always been a problem power. It used to make PvE incredibly simple: teleport single foe, team beatdown, repeat. Then the devs added aggro to its use.

Then it make PvP incredibly simple: lay trip mine trap, teleport target on top, mop up if needed, repeat. Certain powers were put in place to try to stop this.

Also: the griefing thing.

He should play a marauder or white lions then. Perfect class for griefers.

Just another "academic" fucking things up on a quest for knowledge and an overarching theory on gaming to unlock its secret deeper meaning. Nothing like academia coming into the party and fucking things up, much like they do at any kegger or club party event. Instead of just enjoying the event for what it is, there is always some agenda being played out that these super sleuths just have to figure out.

bah...  :uhrr:

Those are the first rules I break.

Oh dear. A self-aggrandizing troll and griefer. I would take his "paper" with a whole shaker of salt. In fact, I would bet dollars to dimes that if you went to CoX forums, you'd get an entirely different picture on what actually happened.

You mean like here? (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=general&Number=13718988&page=0&fpart=1)  If you go far enough you'll even find a Dev post (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=general&Number=13723286&bodyprev=#Post13723286).

Soon I will be swimming in dimes!

If you read the actual paper it's not that he's shocked by his opponent's reaction. He's shocked at the ferocity of the response by his own side. The point of the paper is that the unwritten rules of PVP etiquette trumped the game's artificial rules of hero vs. villain.

What he failed to mention in the paper is one of the biggest reasons he got such a negative reaction from his own side is he'd frequently interrupt otherwise great fights between heroes and villains by teleporting the villains away.  He was engaging in a particularly annoying form of killstealing.  While that doesn't warrant real life death threats, those types of things are hardly unusual on the internet.  There's a reason for the 'internet tough guy' meme.

You'd get a shitty response from teammates if you proceeded to play in an unsportsmanlike manner in any other type of game as well, though.

He keeps trying to make CoX into a war simulation, where the goal is to win at any cost and act like you're at war. What he's failing to grasp is that it's played as a game, because it's a game. Or more likely, he's just being a douche, and trying to justify his desire to be a douche.

I think the generalized culture, as viewed from an academic standpoint, has yet to validate video gaming as anything more than a distraction hobby. When I was doing my graduate work in Sociology/Criminology, I attempted to draw out norms and sanctions in online gaming but was advised to avoid that route due to no one in the field taking it seriously enough to validate my work as nothing more than replication as was done in other areas such as sports. As I tried to discuss and explain my position further, I was finding less and less support in my dept and in the field in general. Basically, I was told it was not a valid field and I should study other areas that mattered or my research and career would stagnate. So much for grad school and the freedom of research...tow the line or fail out. and with that, I walked away.

Christ, I forgot my point... point is, there is very little done in the way of research on the topic and the fact that this guy started the dialog is amiable at best, but his own viewpoint at the onset influenced his paper. More to the point, his assumptions were off base which retarded the entire endeavor.  

edit for spelling and memory lapse.

I'd say he simply used the "research" as a way to enjoy his anti-social tendancies.  We've been on the internet long enough and we've seen what happens when someone is unable to display any empathy towards others because they only view them as virtual beings.  "It's research!" is the perfect excuse to justify the behavior.

Were he doing a psychological experient I can't imagine it making it past the review board, and if it did, not after preliminary results.  He became the experiment, he wasn't acting as an impartial observer.  Shoddy from a research perspective.

I don't know, if he wasn't actually doing research he could have just remained anonymous right? I mean what's the point in coming forward and risking further reprisals? Also I think the real douchebag in this story is the guy who delivered the RL threat. Oh and also the company for not fixing what seems like a pretty obvious exploit.

I don't buy any of it.  Not his faux surprise over the reaction of the community to his griefing, not his self-aggrandizing infamy on the server, nor his fear of being in danger due to reaction to his conduct. 

The only thing I do believe is his inability to distinguish between something being legal and something being acceptable, because he sounds like a complete social retard.

I don't think everyone plays MMO's to make friends? I mean does everyone believe that the social aspect of MMO's should be stronger than the game itself? yeh I know multiplayer hrrm.

Ignoring social conventions can make you unpopular, an academic has discovered. Who would have guessed?

Supposedly a Sociologist at that.

Publicity for his forthcoming book coupled with the fact given his field of study he knows nothing is going to come of the threats?

You know, this guy is right.  Just the other day I was playing chess with a friend and right before he moved I spit directly into his face.  While clearly not against the rules he got up and became physically violent!!!!  It just goes to show you how strangely attached these folks are to their precious "unpoken rules" are when just playing a game.  Fortunately I am skilled enough that I was able to run away and hide and later able to continue the same behavior with other players.  But I must say I am now concerned for my physical safety, who knows what these deranged miscreants may do?  They need to understand boundaries.

Ah ok point taken, it's also good publicity for CoH so the company have a bit of answering to do in that respect. But if he's writing a book on the subject doesn't that further clarify that this was indeed a case study?

Yeh cause playing a computer game is exactly like this, very akin to pushing old ladies off buses and spitting in peoples faces, in fact I would go as far as to say when you kill ten people in an FPS shooter it makes you a borderline homicidal maniac and the police force should watch your steps very closely.

Thanks for your input, Jack Thompson.  :why_so_serious:

Indeed I had him in mind when I wrote that, but seriously you can't apply real life analogies to stuff that goes on in a video game without sounding like you are going down that route somewhat. The minute you start seeing those crossovers that is probably time to put the joystick down imo. Or you might end up being the real idiot who is dishing out RL threats.

Huh.  Interesitng.  Isn't that exactly what the author of this paper is trying to do?

And as for this...

Just no.  The paper is neither academic or journalistic, although I suppose it aspires to both.  The conclusions are obvious, logical and trivial and the 'story' consists entirely of a lopsided retelling of anecdotes by an obvious retard.

Oh I agree... don't take that the wrong way. But its only a matter of time before a cyber Tea Room Trade type qualitative study comes out. I think this is the first shot fired by someone with some time under his belt. I know a few grad students I talked with at national meetings who were interested in studying online communities linked with games but none could find the backing from advisors or tenured faculty. 

Ah, the good old days of Everquest exploit nostalgia (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/35658-eq-cheaters-nostalgia-eq1s-greatest-exploits-rumors.html).

I wish I could find the old video of the guy who would train all the spectres to the beach area in Oasis where they would just rape everyone around, and was immune to other player damage because he was level 5 and couldn't be touched by higher levels.

Spitting into someone's face is universal gesture of contempt, completely unrelated and not attached to chess or any other activity you could be partaking at the time. You could spit into the guy's face out of the blue and in middle of street and odds are, you'd get the same reaction. Bending mechanics of computer game on the other hand ... that can only happen when playing said computer game and as part of that game.

Apples and oranges, in other words.

It's actually relatively simplistic to comment on following within the rules of a physical game and an electronic game yet still skirting the "spirit" of the rules, or what people generally consider to be proper behavior. This seems to eventually result in changes to the rules, just like it does in an electronic game. But essentially his conduct can be linked directly to what we'd call "unsportsmanlike", and just like in physical games, people get pissy about that. Heck, should we go find evidence of people threatening/performing violence over hated sports figures?

Spitting? Yeah, that's immediately stepping into contempt levels. Though off the top of my head, I can't think what law it directly violates. But let's go with easy examples. Go to a bar. Wait for someone in a group of people to get up and go to the bathroom. Take their seat. You've done absolutely nothing illegal, but I'm pretty sure people will be actively unhappy with your actions. Heck, start flirting with his girlfriend. Still legal, but see where this winds up.

There are plenty of "within the law" things you can do that will result in people actively disliking/threatening/being downright pissed at you. This isn't a video game thing, it's a social construct thing. Video games will likely just get to the stupid threats level quickly due to the anonymous nature of it. But a bar where you're not buff and the other group outnumbers you will likely wind up at physical threats pretty fucking quick, too. At that point it's the safety of numbers, instead of the safety of being anonymous.

I don't know why, but reading that made a laugh bubble up and escape unexpectedly. I think it was the mental image I got from it. Well done!  :drillf:

That's what it seems to boil down to, and if in the end his paper goes to note that (also) in simulated environment people are more attached to their informal social constructs than official rules, to the point of getting threatening and abusive when these unspoken rules are repeatedly broken... well, i don't quite see the issue with it -- for many it may be just "duh he's stating the obvious" but having even the obvious actually written down in form of social study can be useful reference for situations where just "everyone knows that" doesn't quite cut it as part of the argument.

Hooray, I get to use this again!

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/spath.jpg)

In academia, nothing is obvious unless you can quote someone else saying it is.

Also, saying, "I expected this result and I proved my hypothesis" is also perfectly acceptable in a field as untapped as online gaming communities.

But yes, Myers does make himself look like a babe in the woods when he was reportedly very vocal about winding people up.

I loved that issue where Doctor Doom trained the city guards onto the Fantastic Four and then teabagged their corpses.

? There's a significant field of people working on online communities linked with games, including grad students. It's not a huge field of study, sure, but it's there, and imho, there's some very good, careful work being done that I think explores questions that gamers do care about or ought to care about.

Even the question of griefing per se, really. All of us here are familiar with griefing as a phenomenon, we're familiar with disputes over what is or is not griefing, but that hardly means that we have a single or comprehensive explanation for what motivates griefers or that we can in all cases simply define what is or is not griefing beyond any dispute.

I think it's interesting, but I also wonder what question needs to be answered in virtual worlds that hasn't already been answered by basic psychology. It's nice that worlds provide a nice controlled environment that let people push bounds they'd never push in the real world, but hasn't ample research already been done on people who do push those bounds in the real world?

Not a hard logic path to follow. Unless you assume everyone is good by nature until some external event changes them.

I preferred the one where he pushed old grannies off the bus and spat in the bus drivers face, truly an evil genius.

True, but online environments arguably lower the barriers to performing certain actions while our reactions to those events can be the same. The first online rape I believe is attributed to Mr Bungle; he never physically touched anyone, but his actions were felt by the victim to have incredibly harmful emotional effects.

So if it is easier to push the boundaries, at what point is "too far"? Insulting someone's sexuality? Teabagging them? Repeatedly ganking them until they log out in a ragequit?

What makes someone grief - and take enjoyment from it - is an interesting sociological question. Especially when it turns out the person doing it isn't a 14-yo with a grudge against the world, but a tenured professor.

"Oh hey, when I act like a douchebag in real life people don't like me.  But that is like TOTALLY unrelated to how people should react to me when I am a douchebag in a  video game.  It's completely different!"

I also simply bent mechanics to spit in my opponents face.  It's reality's fault for not putting some kind of restriction on my behavior, perhaps we never should have evolved saliva glands.  But they are there, and there is nothing stopping me from using them, so they are obviously part of the game.

I thought I'd highlight where you're going wrong here, for your own sake.

Computer game = not reality.

He (and many others) are also handwaving away the fact that often it isn't reasonably possible to fix some exploits in code and that saying 'the game lets you do this but you shouldn't' can be an acceptable way of resolving a problem like the one described. Either the exploit isn't considered critical enough to justify resources devoted to it (which doesn't make it less of an exploit) or fixing it will make something else worse.

In that case 'soft rules' are expected to be adhered to just as much as the limits of reality that are hard-coded into your digital crack of choice. I mean the game doesn't prevent you from installing a macro-botting program, wall hacks and radar right? So it must be ok and anyone who says otherwise just hates freedom!

You know, that's kind of the point -- for some people these things happening in a computer game do make it completely different. Actions which in real world have harmful physical impact lack that effect when the target is virtual doll, plus it is much easier to disregard potential reactions of the target when you never get to see them. Combined, that can and does warp behaviours quite a lot. You may see that guy to be a douchebag, and he may see you just a carebear who should qq more because your tears taste so sweet.

And with this in mind and social norms being mostly shaped by the views of majority at given point, it can be tricky to tell where that norm actually lies in what's pretty much very fresh environment. So it's not a bad thing to have some actual research into it.

Wrong grammatically or philosophically?  I say this because I actually spent some time thinking about the possessive form of the word "reality."

In any event I think the point I am trying to make is obvious, in the context of any game there is a generally accepted concept known as "sportsmanship" (which varies from game to game) and when one steps outside those bounds, you are going to be disliked.  Now this concept varies based on the sport and the degree of being a jerk, take for example two examples from my high school football career:

1.  One of the players on our team had intimate relations with the sister of the opposing teams right tackle.  Throughout the course of the game several members of the team commented before plays about how great it was to #$%^ so-and-so's sister.  The ref overheard and actually kicked two players out for unsportsmanlike conduct.

2.  I watched a game where our JV team was so outmatched that they got blown out 60-something to zero.  In general everyone was pissed off that the opponent ran up the score.

Now it is not against the rules of the game to call someones sister a whore or to run up the score, but in general it is considered bad form and folks are not going to like or respect you if you do those kind of things.  Running up the score is considered bad form but acceptable, insulting relatives is considered beyond the pale.  The same thing applies to video games, if you repeatedly use a mechanic that the general community has agreed is broken, folks are not going to like or respect you.  Duh.  That's the issue I had with this professor's "research,"  he was "shocked, shocked" that folks were angry at him for his use of "legitimate" tactics.   Don't get me wrong, I have been a douchebag in plenty of games (lol suicide ganking in EvE, pking in diablo2) but I don't pretend for a single second that I was not doing it to deliberately be a jerk.

For lot of obvious points there's counter-points though. Some of them even quite valid if approached with open mind.

Introducing the Scrub (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html) (or "sportsmanship vs playing to win")

I was waiting for someone to bring up the "scrub" post.  The problem with that line of reasoning (at least in the original "scrub" post relating to Street Fighter, this one appears to have been modified) is that even the author acknowledges that there is some behavior in the context of the game engine that is unnacceptable (notably playing broken super characters that cannot be beaten) and the entire community has agreed upon this.  I think that is actually an excellent analogy to the case in point of teleport abuse.  It can be done in the game engine, but there is almost unanimous consensus that it should not be.

We are not discussing pvp or pking in general here, we are discussing the deliberate abuse of a mechanic that almost everyone agrees is stupid and unfair.

(Upon further reading I have some issues with this particular iteration of the "scrub mentality" post as it perverts the original document by including long winded diatribe as to why exploiting is acceptable.  The original deliberately stated that cheating/exploitng was NOT acceptable and focused more on the metagame around using powerful combos and developing defenses to them).

I'd be willing to agree if not for a post in this very thread from someone who with little thinking had found some ways to turn tables on the mechanics abuser. Which in a way confirms the "scrub" thing -- problems that could otherwise be worked around stay problems when people choose to cry "unfair" rather than actively counter them. Also, the 'broken things everyone agrees shouldn't be used' are much easier to determine in games which limit the match to just two players duking it out. Open PvP by its very nature can neutralize some seemingly unbeatable advantages.

Or to put it in another way... he wasn't the only guy in game with access to teleport skill, was he?

edit:
You probably mean this version: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

Well first I think the enitre "scrub mentality" mindset was developed by a 14-year old in an attempt to rationalize poor sportmanship so if you are operating from that frame of refence I am just going to have to fundamentally disagree with you.  The issue is not whether teleporting can be countered.  The issue was players reactions to his behavior and the professors apparent surprise that folks thought he was a dickhead.  You have an option to be an unsportsmanlike dickhead who wants to win and all costs and ruin everyone else fun, but don't labor under the illusion that folks are going to view you as some kind of hero for your decidedly obnoxious behavior. (See Bobby Knight).

Only just noticed but interestingly enough, Sirlin has article on this very professor case -- http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/7/7/dr-house-and-the-professor-who-played-to-win.html

edit:
I guess this just comes back to potential difference in views on what is acceptable as part of the play, which in turn can stem from different perceptions of virtual environment and how it alters (or not) impact of behaviours.

Also, there actually isn't much surprise or "shock" expressed in his paper, it's pretty much neutral in reporting the results. It seems lot of that "lolol why he's shocked at what he's found out" thing going around is a distortion casting the guy in negative light, quite like it happened to his character in game.

We aren't discussing his paper.  We are discussing what he said to a reporter during an interview, things like:

"He believes it proved that, even in a 21st century digital fantasyland, an ugly side of real-world human nature pervades, a side that oppresses strangers whose behavior strays from that of the mainstream."

Yes, people thought he was a dickhead for acting like a dickhead, and then they "oppressed" him by ostracizing him.  I demand this man be given a chair at Yale!

Also from the article:

"Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules"

We are not in any way distorting what this dude said.  He was "stunned" that folks would have a negative reaction to his acting like a douche.   See why we are laughing at him?

Hehe "developer think" :grin: You wouldn't even need to touch the code just publish a blog stating it's an exploit anyone reported doing it will be dealt with, this is pretty much what CCP do except without the devblog :P

The problem with that article is it takes everything Myers wrote in his paper at face value.  Unfortunately there are numerous distortions in that paper, and more than one outright lie.  Reasonable conclusions can't be drawn from it because the data is unreliable.

Nothing about playing to win (assuming you aren't out and out cheating) should absolve any social stigma for doing so, however.

I can expect some level of scorn and derision if I say, bust out my A game against a basketball team of quadriplegics. Why? Because it's a dick move. Now, should I play to win? Certainly, in a highly competitive arena.

I will note for a second though, that Twixt was not "playing to win" by the rules of the game. He was playing to stall. His method of killing opposing players did nothing to earn points for himself or his team. The equivalent to playing a soccer game with the express intent of simply injuring the other team off the field. While you may technically be "winning" in a sense, you are not winning by the rules of the game (which would be to score points).

This entirely stops short of the extreme of "play to win", which would be anything goes playstyle. Radar hacks, steriods, drugging the opposing players, whatnot. There's a hard stop where skill at a game matters, versus doing ANYTHING to win.

I think there's a set of aesthetic and interpretative questions about virtual worlds that parallel the questions that any cultural form raises: what works, what doesn't, what's meaningful or artistic or beautiful, what advances or changes the form, what retards its development. Same questions that a smart, thoughtful, knowledgeable person can ask about film, or literature, or theater, etc., just that those questions take on a particular character when digital games or virtual worlds are the subject.

There's a second set of more sociological and psychological questions about virtual worlds where something like basic psychology is relevant. First, keep in mind that there are plenty of questions about psychology, sociology and cultural practices that are far from "answered", so any new source of data or new environment can be useful. There's interesting research, for example, about how players in virtual worlds tend to maintain distance between avatars that's roughly similar to the distance that we tend to maintain between ourselves and others in the real world, and that being too close to another avatar produces some of the same discomfort that being too close in the real world can. Once you see the research, you say, "Of course!", but it's still interesting to discover that our social psychology is portable into a representation of a person. (The results change also depending on the way a game represents an avatar and whether or not you're dealing with avatars you presume to be controlled by other people or avatars that are controlled by the game engine.)

For me, the most interesting distinctive sociological and anthropological questions about virtual worlds involve questions about the interaction between design & rulesets on one hand and the culture and society of a given virtual world on the other. Those are interesting questions because we have a lot of the same kinds of issues in the world at large (the relationship between laws and behavior, social structure and behavior, deep psychology or biology and behavior, history and behavior, and so on), but virtual worlds sometimes let you think about those questions in novel ways. Sometimes because the rules-to-practices relationships are a lot simpler than in the real world--you can see new cultural practices or social relationships shift and form after developers make a small change in the rules or game environment, or conversely, you can see players stubbornly reproducing some practices even when developers try to get them to change what they're doing. Sometimes because of the time and spatial compression of virtual worlds: things happen far faster and in a smaller physical and social space than the world at large. Sometimes because the relationship between developers and players has some really distinctive aspects that aren't closely mimicked or paralleled in the real world, or because a gameworld can do or be things that the real world cannot be.

If the team of quadriplegics enters the game with your team fully aware you'll play to the best of your ability and they don't request a handicap, the alternate view could be it's a dick move to pity them and not play at your actual level. As it's apparently not what they want, and it's not like someone is twisting their arm to get them into that game with you. :oh_i_see:

Overall the point being... that 'social stigma' etc, it can often stem from difference in opinions where neither of the views is actually more valid than other. It can be expected as reaction yes, but not necessarily taken into account as any kind of worthy feedback by the person who sees no logical reason to subscribe to that view to begin with. "Cry some moar" etc.

Well, the goal as per rules of the game was to take control of multiple hotspots in the zone, and he claims that's what he's been achieving during his play. If that's the case then i'd have to conclude he was indeed playing to win *and* winning, at least according to how the game rules would define victory conditions.

Why was he not banned?

He can't have been obtaining the objectives (someone else may have been, but not him), since you'll not from nevermore's description of the zone, only one said hotspot is within his normal drone hunting range.

Now, if the hotspots were full of faction NPCs that he was pulling into while capping/defending the point, you have a point.

If he's just killing hostiles by dragging them into random NPC packs, he's doing nothing more than deathmatching in the middle of the WSG field. Which isn't winning by any real measure of the rules of the game.

You raised some great points. I should clarify that I'm not looking to write off these worlds as mere simulcra of what we already know about human existence. Rather, I think the "surprise" and "uniqueness" aspect often trumpeted in reports of player behavior inflate the actual amount of surprise and uniqueness a semi-aware person should have about them. Having those reactions from a newb is fine. Having those from a scientist is where I have the problem.

Separately, to the quote above, yea, that's the part I find the most intriguing as well. While some of our behaviors may be transportable, the environment itself changes the outcome. The challenge isn't the changed behavior, it's the disproportionate impact that behavior has on other people. But there's still an underlying question I've often wondered about:

Do the percentage of people "cheating" in some form in a virtual world correlate in any way to the percentage of people in the physical world? Do permissive anonymous worlds unlock an inner-cheat in all of us? Or do most people bring with them the morals of the real space?

If the 'soft rules' were put in place by the development team and communicated to the player base, then he would have been banned after a warning or two. If the dev team wasn't concerned enough about it to take any action, it is fair game. Sure the guy is a dick, but I will never tire of harvesting the tears of people who play PvP games, enter PvP zones, and then bitch when they get killed. That just baffles me.

Because it's nearly impossible to be banned from CoX.  At least back then, might be different now that it's Paragon Studios.  GMing was always handled directly by NCsoft though, and they had one GM pool that did the duties for all their active games.

Well, that's presuming that teleporting people into guarding NPCs was the only thing he was doing in the zone 24/7 leaving him no time for anything else. If it was on the other hand used simply as a way to get the people out of path to the actual objective then it doesn't exclude possibility he was winning the games there eventually. If his claim of winning games was false i'd expect people to deny/question it, just like they did with his other claims...

This is just guessing but I wouldn't be surprised if it was just considered too much of a headache to have to constantly police the behavior instead of just ignore it.  I'm not sure exactly what the relationship between the studio (Cryptic and later Paragon Studio) and the admin functions (NCsoft doing GMing, accounts, billing and the like) is like and who gets final say on what would be actionable or not.  I know that when NCsoft had that big GM layoff (I think it was after Auto Assault crashed and burned) it became really hard to get a GM to respond to even gamestopping issues in a timely fashion.  Getting a GM to investigate whether or not someone was droning in PvP was probably deemed too time consuming to bother with.

It's actually not a trivial thing to capture a pillbox unless it's a group of people doing it or no one is bothering you.  Not hard so much as time consuming.  I can't say he's lying about it, but I find his claim that he captured the zone "hundreds of times" to be questionable.  Not impossible, since in the morning and early afternoon the pvp zones were mostly devoid of people, but he spins it as though he's some unstoppable cyclone sweeping all opposition aside as he single-handedly claimed victory for the heroes despite the best efforts of the villains to stop him.  Let me assure you this was not the case.

It sounds like he had a lot of free time so he could have done a lot of that zone capturing when there wasn't much opposition.  

Oh, that reminds me of the influence farmers, who did spend most of their time farming in RV at off-peak hours.  These were not the regular players just trying to get influence for whatever, these were the 'professional' farmers that sold influence. Aka, the Chinese goldfarmers.  They did this in RV because one of the many design flaws of the zone is the mechanics of the 'Heavies'.  Heavies are large robots that you can take control of as pets.  They are very powerful and hard to kill.  The design is that you use the heavies to help capture the pillboxes and as something that changes up PvP some from the other zones.  Sort of like the WoW vehicles.  

The flaw is you still get influence from killing NPCs when your Heavy kills them.  Thus, the goldfarmer gets a Heavy and has it kill all the enemy faction NPCs for almost free influence.  This is not considered an exploit.  Obviously, the goldfarmer hates and refuses to engage in PvP if at all humanly possible.  Most fit the tired stereotype of having very limited knowledge of English, thus you'd hear 'No PK' if you attacked one.  So the vitriol aimed at Twixt wouldn't have come from the goldfarmers, but it's likely some of his assumptions that people wouldn't PvP in RV was based on the goldfarmers.  But in all honesty, Myers should have known better since it was very common knowledge about what was going on with them.

Edit: also, Villain-side goldfarming was more popular for the farmers than Hero-side because the Villain Heavy has a large PBAoE attack that will one-hit kill anything except boss-level NPCs, and the Heavy will just two or three hit kill those.  The Hero Heavy has nasty attacks too, but the damage attacks it has are mostly single-target.  Its AoE is made up of more crowd control, which makes it much less efficient for farming.

I see, your that guy! You know, the guy who trashtalks at the company softball game.  The guy who deliberately fouls a 90 pound 14 year old girl in their rec league game.  The guy who comes to nickel poker game wearing sunglasses and sitting stone-faced like he was Chris Moneymaker.

Dude, not every leisure time activity is the Superbowl.  There are rational limits to the degree of competitiveness one exhibits that relate to the activity and circumstance one belongs in.  If you were playing in the NBA finals you would be expected to play far more aggressively then in a pick up game with your 12 year old niece.  Now apply that to video games.  Sure if I was in a competitive league with money on the line folks would expect bringing your A-game and doing everything possible to win.  Sitting around with your level 80 rogue and one-shotting everyone in the Barrens: dick move (I should know, I have done this).  Why can't you understand this?

I am not saying this should be stopped, you may have a very good reason to kill level 20's in the Barrens (maybe to draw out higher level characters in their guild).  But don't pretend your not playing the asshat card, because you are.

Of course it wasn't impossible to ban him.  They just didn't.  They probably should have, as it was pretty clearly an unintended exploit.  I mean, Blizz would have banned him in two shakes of a lamb's tail.  On the other hand, Blizz probably would have closed the loophole too.

Of course it's not impossible for NCsoft/Cryptic/Paragon to ban someone.  I'm saying the way they set the system up it's nearly impossible for a player to do something that gets them banned.  You have to move well past the grey areas and into actions that force the Admin's hands before you get into ban territory.  I've tried to lay out possible reasons why that's so, but I've never seen the inner workings of how NCsoft set up their GM structure so I'm just speculating and could be way off base.

Yes, Blizz would have banned him and imo rightly so.  But as far as I know Vivendi isn't doing the GMing for Blizzard.  Blizzard does that for themselves.  Extra layer of hierarchy + not enough staff = lots of stuff gets ignored.  At least, that's my theory.

I think this is exactly the kind of question that:

a) gamers are keenly aware of
b) have been discussing avidly more or less ever since MUDs
c) is both important and really difficult to resolve in any final way (important for good design, important for having fun in games, important for what it might tell us about cheating or rules-breaking in the wider world)
d) academic games research could contribute to exploring in ways that go beyond or complement what gamers themselves already know

Mia Consolvo has a really good book on cheating in MMOs that at the very least would enliven any discussion of these issues. I just think gamers sometimes tend to feel so jaded both by long experience with games and by having long since arrived at their own personal theory about these issues that they forget how live and open these kinds of questions still are. It's one reason that even here, on a games-centered forum, it's getting hard to keep some conversations about games going for very long and everyone goes off to Politics or whatever, because there's a tendency to say, "Eh, we already know the answer to this, there's nothing to talk about any more, stfu". I agree that when you've been talking about an issue forever, there's a tendency to just want to wash your hands of it and walk away, but sometimes there's a good reason why a topic just won't go away.

This is not to say that this particular researcher's work is the best way to explore these questions, mind you. But just one small thought: it can be pretty hard if you're writing about games for non-gamer audiences to figure out what to explain and not explain, and there's often a certain amount of mugging for the camera going on just because you can't start by saying, "Ok, we already all know that most of this is an old and established story in virtual worlds, so let me cut to the chase and tell you about the one interesting novelty to the way I was looking at this issue."

Wrong metaphor.  It's one-shotting a level 20 who's standing in Icecrown somehow. 

Anyways, context is everything. 

If your favorite team is playing another in competitive basketball, and they're crushing them 80-0 at the half, do you think they should stop?

No, more of the guy who doesn't get a popping vein if the other party chooses to play it rough. Winning (or losing) an all-out match tends to be more satisfying than playing one where you know the opponent is going easy on you, so if i get opportunity for one it just seems silly to cry "oh but it's lame".

I don't think that many people actually enjoy knowing they were deliberately given a handicap because their opponent thought they suck so much they need one, when it wasn't arranged beforehand. Of course ymmv.

What if it's 12 year olds playing with one another, are they allowed to play aggressively against someone who is as (un)skilled as they are? Or is this not allowed and they're being dicks if they try because it's not NBA? Or what if it's activity where there's no risk of physical injury which would cause the "won't someone please think of the children" card no longer really apply?

While true that not every leisure activity is the Superbowl it doesn't equal it is somehow wrong to ever make it anything more focused than just casual dicking around. Rational rules stop being rational when they're applied too strictly.

Mercy rules are common in non competitive sports. Recall the dustup a while ago over that random school trying to hit 100 points against some disabled school's team. At a point it goes from "playing to win" to "rubbing it in their faces", which regardless of the game's outcome point wise should probably be discouraged under a try to be a generally nice fucking person in life social rule.

I also recall the coach dropping the full court press at the half.  And the parents and players on the disabled team, going rather specifically, "we're not disabled, and we're perfectly fine the way we played."  The coach even is quote as noting that some of his girls would never be able to play on any other team in the state.

Again, you play competitive sports, then part of the onus should be on you.  Did the coach sub out his starters and stop the full court press?  


25 points, three minutes into the first quarter.  Only 12 points made in the last quarter.

Those kids did nothing wrong short of taking players completely out to make it an uneven game.  With no mercy rule, and the other team unwilling to just forfeit, what else were they supposed to do, just hand the ball over?  It's quite possibly the most insulting thing ever.

Looking at the stats with a standard mercy rule of 45-50 points, Dallas would've Mercy ruled out of most of the games they've played.

EDIT:  Other mercy rules in high school basketball:


Either way, this is a rather large tangent to the real discussion.

It's slightly a tangent on the whole sportsmanlike conduct angle. The other story on that game is that the coach and assistant coach were goading their players into trying to hit triple digits since they could, and that's somewhat confirmed by the last 4 minutes going by without a single basket. As soon as they hit 100, they just stopped. That's not going all out as best as you can, or taking it easy on the other team. So it fails both our ideas of sportsmanlike conduct.

Did they do nothing wrong? By the rules of the game? Nope. By the social rules attached to be considered honorable and good players? Well, look at the entire controversy and fallout afterwords.

The basic idea is that in a life or death situation, go absolutely nuts. Do anything in your power to live. Are you playing a game? Try not to be a total douche for no reason. Now, you're free to be a douche, but don't expect people to love you for it.

What you're describing is covered under the arena system.  CoX has arenas where premade teams can play premade teams.  The PvP zones aren't like WoW battlegrounds.  WoW battlegrounds you sign up to join and you're matched with roughly equal (in theory) teams.  CoX PvP zones are like the DAoC frontiers: a PvP sandbox where anyone (though somewhat level restricted in CoX's case) can just zone whenever they want. 

It's like going to the local community basketball court for pick-up games just for fun not knowing who else will be there or even know how many people will be there.  You're saying if the Phoenix Suns decide to show up there one day they have every right to play the neighborhood rec center kids as if it's the NBA finals.  They might have the right but they'd be dicks to do so.

In the case of Twixt I'd use this analogy:

Local rec center kids show up for some basketball.  There aren't a lot of them that day so for whatever reason some decide they'd like to play some HORSE.  Twixt shows up and thinks 'Hmm, these are basketball courts!  I'm going to play basketball because that's what these courts are meant for and I'm going to make those guys play with me!'  So he runs up, grabs the ball and makes his shot at the other end of the court.  These guys keep trying to get the ball and play their game of HORSE but this Twixt guy keeps stealing it because he's playing basketball the way these courts are designed to be played, damnit!  The HORSE guys get really pissed off at Twixt and complain to whoever it is that's in charge of a rec center, who shrugs.  'Sorry, basketball court.'  Some of the HORSE guys confront and/or threaten Twixt because he's being, you know, an asshole and eventually they all leave in disgust.  Twixt won the game of basketball!  The way it was meant to be played by the people who designed the basketball courts!  'So why did those guys get so pissed off at me?', Dr. Twixt, PhD wonders.  'I think I'll write a paper about it.  I'll make sure to mention that I beat them at basketball hundreds of times, too.  Obviously they didn't like me because my basketball prowess is so great, which my record of wins vs. losses demonstrates.  And since I wasn't thrown off the court I must be in the right.'

Pick up games?  In Streetball you keep it real.
(http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/09/15/ic_streetball_wideweb__470x352,0.jpg)
 :drill:

But with the mechanics list above, you are correct.



I like your analogy better.

Which is why you go easy on them, but don't tell them/rub it in their face.  That's part of sportsmanship too.  The real key to sportsmanship is not grace in losing, it's grace in winning.  Maybe I'm old fashioned but I think showing sportsmanship is a pretty laudable goal, and not showing it is justifiably vilified.  Again, play however you want to, but people respect folks who show respect.

You should understand situations where it will be appropriate to go easy on an opponent and not need it spelled out for you, if you don't you should learn.  This isn't a question of "having a different perspective" its a question of willfully being a jackass and expecting the world to love you for it.  The only thing folks dislike more than a sore loser is an obnoxious winner.  You don't need a PhD. in sociology to figure this out.

I.e. not only you decide for them they suck so much they need a handicap, but you also judge them stupid enough not to be able to tell. And take high moral ground while doing so.

Sorry, but while i see how in theory it could be considered good sportmanship... as long as the people on the receiving end aren't indeed total morons this approach feels more dickish and insulting than straight being a dick.

Bravo!

Has anyone ever said you write beautifully when trying to beat a concept into someone's head? ;D

See that highlighted part.  You should work on understanding why that isn't true.

I don't know, maybe you could explain why you think this way? I say this feels more dickish because you're treating your opponent as both inferior and stupid, i.e. combining two different insults in your behaviour while the alternative is "just" one insult that's questionable to boot (giving your opponent a hard match, likely above their level of ability)

Why thank you!  I'm glad I resisted the temptation of trying to force the tele-ganking into the analogy by giving Basketball Twixt an extendable 20' Inspector Gadget-like arm.   :grin:

One question arising from this analogy -- why is an asshole only the guy who wants to play basketball at basketball court, rather than few guys who'd decided to use the place for some other activity and now demand things stay their way? That is, if continuing this analogy you pictured yourself as a guy who arrives to the court with wish to play a game of basketball but the few people present there were telling you to either play HORSE or get lost... wouldn't you consider their attitude to be that of assholes, too?

I'm going to assume you are not trolling or being deliberately obtuse.  Ok look.  There are many interactions we as human beings have with other human beings in which we are not entirely truthful in order to maintain the social contract.  It''s not "insulting" to tell these types of white lies, in fact they are necessary for social harmony and in general considered the hallmarks of being a well adjusted person.

Is it patronizing to open a door for an old lady is she could open it herself with some difficulty?  Is it patronizing to help a young child across a road?  When your wife asks you if she looks fat in a dress and she does, should you tell her?  The literal truth to these questions is yes it is a bit patronizing to do so.  We do these things/tell these lies because it makes getting along in the context of the larger society much easier.

The same is true for sports and games.  Games are not simply a competitive exercise designed to "crush your enemy, have them driven before you and listen to the lamentation of their women.  It serves an important social function as well.  The goal is often to interact as a community and for everyone to have fun.  If you are beating a team 70 to nothing easing up a little is not patronizing, you have proven that you are the superior player continuing to push the envelope seems as if you are trying to "rub it in".

If you are Michael Jordan it is not patronizing to not bring your A game to a 1 on 1 vs a 10 year old.  To a lesser degree this applies to other interactions.  I play tennis with my wife.  She is better than me, but she doesn't power serve to the other side of the court every time she is up because it is pointless, proves nothing and is no fun.   She plays a more relaxed game so we can both have fun.  She plays in tournaments on occasion and when she does she brings her A game, because it is appropriate in that context.

There is a time to be competitive and there is a time not to.  Common sense dictates when these moments are, if you are unable to distinguish you lack certain fundamental social skills.

tmp, you're arguing just for the sake of arguing, right?

More of a devil's advocate thing. It's an interesting subject and actually having to reconsider basis for one's belief system rather than just fallback on convenient "that's the way things should be and everyone who doesn't agree is just a dick" ... well, that's useful imo. Lack of reflection can easily lead to mob mentality, something that does seems to happen to these 'MMO communities' more often than not.

If there were a group of guys playing HORSE and ten more guys showed up wanting to play basketball and that was the only court, then an argument could be made from the point of view that the HORSE guys are monopolizing the court and preventing the basketball guys from playing.  What happens in this case in the context of CoX pvp zones is the basketball guys start playing their game anyway and the HORSE guys really don't have a moral high ground to complain about the basketball play disrupting their game.

That doesn't apply to what Twixt was doing, though.  Twixt never grouped with players on his own side.  So if the only people on the court when he shows are the HORSE guys, there aren't any basketball options for him.  The HORSE guys aren't obligated to play basketball just because a basketball guy shows up.

The thing about Twixt is he was never really a participant even when there was a basketball game going on.  Forgive me for working this into the analogy after all but what Twixt would do is even if there was a pick-up game of basketball going on, he'd be using is 20' Inspector Gadget arm to grab the ball and dunk it while standing on the sideline, disrupting the game for both sides.  That's why his own side hated him as much as the other side did.  He'd have you think that he was the lone basketball freedom fighter in a world of HORSE players who hated and ostracized him for daring to try to play basketball when instead they hated him for disrupting both games because the guy in charge of the rec center let him use the Inspector Gadget arm from the sideline.  Twixt was being a dick to everyone, which is why nobody liked him.

I think the catch here is, with people being individuals you can't define universally good way to handle these social situations. One old lady can be grateful for the help you provide, but another may well cuss you out for it either because she has her priorities set different or she misread your intentions. Similar for other such situations. Therefore it can be quite presumptous to push single model of behaviour to the point of excluding any alternative.

And yes, the same is indeed true for sports and games. When it comes to the computer games over intrawebs it becomes even more tricky because you lose lot of social cues that'd otherwise help to pick your behaviour, and you lose the convenience of being matched just with people of comparable skill like it happens with regular sports. That avatar in front of you may be driven by the old lady, the young child or even your wife for that matter, and you'll usually have very little way to tell (unless you've already played against them enough times) if that's someone who "needs" a handicap from you, someone who wants that handicap or maybe to the contrary, it's someone who could kick your ass three ways to Sunday and/or won't hesitate to do so.

So with this in mind it's pretty difficult for me to write off any case of someone who puts effort in the match as "oh he's a dick, this is not place for this kind of game". That may well be instead them overestimating me, or pegging me as sort of player who wants to be provided with this kind of game. Or they consider my act of entering game zone where 'everything goes' as consent for indeed, anything that can go. Consequently? It's hard for me to treat seriously situations in these MMOs if there's complaints after such game how "oh that's lame, you suck because you didn't go easy on me, you're a dick for doing so". The players don't have their individual expectations and abilities tattooed on the foreheads, and without these any approach you'll take it's going to be at best educated assumption. And assumptions are, welp.

Well, his paper mentions he'd reduce and eventually stop grouping with others over time, as result of both increasing ostracism and cases of people with multi-box setups inviting him to hero groups only to then try to kill him . That would imply the "never grouped with others" thing isn't quite correct.

Also, the not being obligated part is where i think the analogy breaks somewhat -- open PvP zone being what it is, the act of entering it is technically giving consent to become subject of said PvP at any time while in there. Maybe a closer analogy would be something like group of people coming to dodgeball court and then demanding a guy who throws a ball at them to stop it and get lost because they're there to dunno, practice juggling or something equally semi-relevant to original idea?

So you never make assumptions in real life or in a virtual world?  :oh_i_see:  You know damn well you can make educated guesses about your behavior and if you honestly believe this dude did not know he was acting like an asshat you are a fool or a liar.

Edit:  He may also have had some inkling he was being a douche by the fact that all of the other players on both sides of the game were calling him a douche and asking him to stop.  That might be a pretty big clue but hey since you can't read minds they could all be lying.   So to take that as truth would be an assumption, and as you just stated assumptions are welp...  :why_so_serious:

Mandatory Every-Half-Page Sanity Announcement:

PEOPLE WERE IN A PVP ZONE, ONE OF THE VERY FEW AREAS OF THE GAME WHERE PVP IS ENGAGED IN.  THE REST OF THE GAME IS PVE.  TWIXT WAS NEVER BANNED, AND CRYPTIC NEVER ANNOUNCED SUCH TACTIC AS AN EXPLOIT.


This needs to be said every half page in this thread, because that's roughly the amount of time it takes for everyone to forget it again and declare Twixt to be Satan and his victims to be legless orphans, playing from wifi in the streets of Calcutta.


Cryptic could've coded against this.  Cryptic could have banned him.  Hell, if we choose to believe the people in this thread who are saying "THOSE THINGS ARE UNPOSSIBLE CRYPTIC WAS TOO BUSY", then they could have taken 30 seconds to post and say "this is an exploit." 

Cryptic does none of those things?  Too bad, so sad, best of luck with that exp debt.  I'd make further comments about how maybe the "victims" should adjust their tactics so this doesn't happen, but if the last ten years of MMO history has taught me anything its that suggesting PvP victims alter their tactics is pretty much the worst possible sin anyone can commit. 

Tri, i think we got a bit far afield on the "sportsmanship" discussion, but this is not the thrust of the thread.  We are mocking him because he is claiming to be "shocked" that his behavior generated a negative response when it is obviously pretty unsportsmanlike even if technically legal (I KNOW PVP HAZ NO RULEZ!!! TWO MAN ENTER ONE MAN LEAVE!!!! TRIFORCER RUNS BARTER-TOWN!!!!).

Maybe it started out that way, but the discussion morphed into how he is a terrible person in general.  Mocking his "shock" at the reaction to him is a just a thinly veiled way to criticize him for his underlying playstyle preference.

Bottom line:  If Cryptic can't even be bothered to have one intern take 15 seconds to post on a message board about how a behavior is illegal/an exploit- well, this thread should properly be about their incompetence, not the reaction of ADD-addled 15 year old COX forumites to a very clumsy troll.   

As pointed out, it's interesting that 1) he got a negative reaction from his own team, 2) he got kicked out of his SG and 3) he got at least one death threat.

As I said before, in academia, it isn't obvious unless you can quote someone else saying its obvious. The newspaper report and paper might be subjective, but it is worthwhile that he recorded one look at griefing in a MMO. It adds to the body of material in that area.

What I find really interesting as well is that on the CoH/V forum's main thread on this topic, Castle (a dev) came in and called Twixt "a rank amateur next to Fansy", which sent all these people off to look up Fansy and find out about him. A good number of these people came back saying how funny Fansy was doing what he did.

All I can surmise is that when someone is roleplaying a dick, it's funnier when you don't run into them.

No, of course i make them; just generally choose not to bother to cry foul if they turn out to be wrong, especially if it's about behaviours in virtual combat zone where everything goes, one i've entered willingly and knowing i should indeed expect anything in there :why_so_serious:

But that was just more generic musing about the nature of these social clashes and difficulty in guessing intentions of others -- as far as the professor and his project is concerned his paper makes it pretty clear he was well aware he's playing in ways that go against people's self-imposed rules. It was after all the whole point of the research.

On the sportsmanship discussion, I'm going to say I agree with tmp's position so far in that if people are engaging in a game or some other competitive activity, both sides should play to win and give their best effort, unless there's an agreement or some other communication whereby one (or both) of them agree to go easy.  But if I'm playing a game, whatever sort of game that is, unless I specifically say 'Hey I'm not as good as you, go easy on me please.' or something of that sort, I want my opponent to do their best, and would be upset if they did not.  There are situations in which taking it easy is entirely appropriate, but it's not something I want people to just assume for me.

There's quite a bit of discussion about this on Terra Nova, including responses from Dr. Myers himself. (And yes, I quoted Nevermore's post here verbatim. Myers denied its validity, of course.)

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2009/07/twixt.html

He finally did admit that his paper was better described as a journal of his experiences than an objective research experiment.

There's that I suppose.

I also like how Bartle questions the ethics about this like I did.  Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks the method itself was shoddy.

Edit:

Gah.  Now having read his comments I can say this is like the worst idiot professor I've ever encountered.  He speaks of Twixt like some separate entity and using flowery language calls Never a liar.  Yet he takes personal offense at all this, and has been said repeatedly, at people insulting him for behavior his insider knowledge knew would cause such reactions.  I wasn't ever close to being involved and I'm offended just having to listen to his lame, convoluted reasoning.

His idiocy is griefing me. :x

But what if our reaction to his paper is ALSO part of the research experiment?  Proving yet again his point?  I believe several posters in this community over the years have informed us in their last post that their posting style was a deliberate test of our ability to respect different viewpoints, and we failed. 

What's his point?  That he can provoke a reaction?

Much of the topic reminds me of my last online warcraft III.  "OMG NO RUSH, U WAIT 30 MIN, NO RUSH!"  Soft rules are great, and I'm not one to trash social conventions and whatnot, but just because the majority chooses to play one way doesn't mean people who disagree should be removed from the game.  His "shock" is just sensationalizing shit.  Researchers do that to get their research noticed, nothing to see there.

Fair enough, I will concede your and TMP's point that it is sometimes difficult to make these assessments in a video game in the absence of other evidence.  However I do want to point out there are some pretty obvious examples (lol camping 20's in the barrens).  I don't think this is relative in this case however because the community told him pretty clearly to cut it out.

My favorite response to him on Lum's thread:

My commentary on his personality/playstyle entirely stem from his knowing full well in any logical progression (as in, write down steps 1-10 of what you will do, this was the logical and easily assumed case), and continuing to do it anyways, then posturing how he was SHOCKED that anyone would actually take offense at his methods. Knowing full well that he was doing what the social construct in the game would term a "dick move"

Again, just throw out the real life analogies. There's nothing stopping me from showing up at your birthday party with flowers and chocolates for your girlfriend and talking about our hot passionate tryst years ago in gory detail. But the social constructs we have as a society would likely term this a "dick move", and it wouldn't work out well in the end. But it's totally legal to do so!

I'm not seeing how this is passing by people. There is a ton of shit you can do that's entirely within the laws of the country you are in at the moment that are still considered by the society you're surrounded by at the moment as being total douche actions. All he's doing in this "study" is the equivalent of saying "but have you ever been a douchebag... ON THE INTERNET?!"

Occam's Razor. When confronted with seemingly douchebaggy behaviour on many fronts, and given the choices

a) everything is an elaborate experiment designed by a scientific genius, or

b) he's just a douchebag,

I choose b.

QFT

Occam's points to the other direction actually, simplest answer being he did it for an ongoing case study. Being a douchebag is far too vague, why would someone especially a college professor continually do a cheap trick over and over just for the sake of it? Being a douchebag leads to far too many other questions or assumptions which is against the principle of Occam's razor as you should know.

I'm don't see how the simplicity argument of Occam's favors "secretly this is all just another layer of testing" over the simpler "he's just kind of a dick" response. Especially with his admission that this entire thing isn't really an experiment at all, he just called it one in the paper for no reason. Unless that's also another layer!

By that logic, conspiracy theories HAVE to be true, because a government coverup is the simplest answer.

Look, again, I'm not wild about the methodology or presentation of this particular research. (I especially find a performance of naivete-to-knowingness annoying in someone doing this kind of research, because it either means they didn't read the scholarship at the outset or they're exaggerating to make it seem like they 'discovered' something.) There are far better studies of both cheating and griefing out there.

However, just look at this discussion if you want to get a sense of how messy the intersection of games + rules + social norms + moral beliefs is in general and how messy it can be in any given particular situation. People stay in some games or play contexts even when one participant is a douchebag; they walk away from others when that happens; they seek to punish or restrict a douchebag player in still other contexts. Sometimes people try to change the game or form of play itself to prevent douchebaggery. And sometimes they have long-standing debates about what is or is not douchebaggery. Sometimes we even watch or participate in games where there's a deliberate contrast between douchebag play and "sportsmanlike" play because we like rooting for one side or the other.

Think of all the movies about games and sport where that's the basic storyline, and sometimes we're encouraged to identify with the more cunning rule-breaker because he's smarter or more charismatic than the dully sportsmanlike opponent. Sometimes the person who bends a rule creates an exciting new playstyle--in baseball, when the players were integrated after Jackie Robinson, a lot of older white players complained because the Negro League players stole bases a lot more. It was legal, it was exciting to watch, and it wasn't as if the white players weren't in some cases fast enough. It's just that they had a kind of understanding that it was something you didn't do often. It made the game better when that covenant went into the trash pile. Sometimes people hotly debate where the line between douchebaggery and sportsmanlike play lies. There were a lot of people who hated Muhammed Ali's trash-talking and ring-dancing and rope-a-doping and wanted people to just punch it out like Foreman and Frazier usually did; and then suddenly everyone loved Ali and saw him as legitimately redefining what boxing could or should be.

Cheating/griefing is a really potent zone of intersection between games, rules, the social life of play and our general moral beliefs. I can't imagine why anyone would ever think this is a totally settled, obvious or boring thing to look at (academically or otherwise).

I only had time to skim over that thread but it didn't seem like he was calling me a liar per se so much as just picking one part of my quote and counterpointing it.  He was technically correct in some of the points in his reply but he was also disingenuous in a lot of it.

There are other counters to TP Foe but only the one grantable buff as I said.  The other defense are:

• A handful of specific powers in a small number of defense sets (not whole archetypes).  I can think of three defense sets offhand out of ten or so sets that originally had it, available to two of the five Villain archetypes (both the melee archetypes), with one or two more added later (which may or may not have been post-Twixt, I don't remember the timing).  Those are the 'always on' powers.  There are also a handful of temporary self buffs that provide protection but that list is even shorter and that's including the one or two 'tier 9s' Myer's is referring to.
• One type of inspiration, which are basically CoX's version of potions: temporary short duration (30 seconds for the common ones, 120 seconds for the largest iirc) buffs.  Since they have to be used proactively and only a limited number of inspirations can be carried (up to 20 of all kinds total) these can be considered a limited couter.
• Invisibility is of course a counter because you can't TP what you can't see.  However, the Drones provide a passive buff to nearby players providing increased perception, allowing them to see invisible characters from a greater range.  The drone buffs stack with each other (Drone density means it's not uncommon to get up to 3 overlapping buffs) and also stack with player perception powers.  Basically, if you aren't a Stalker (Stalkers have a higher Invisibility cap than other archetypes and generally can't be seen with perception buffs) then Invisibility is not a big issue for a TP Droner.  And everyone, including Stalkers, become visible again as soon as they attack something.  This includes the pillbox turrets.  The only way the situation Myers describes where a Stalker ninjas the Alpha pillbox can happen is if all the turrets were already destroyed somehow and Myers wasn't paying attention to the villain that materialized in the center of the pillbox and remains visible for the 10 or so seconds it takes to capture it.
• And of course numbers.  Yes, throw enough people at a problem and you can eventually overcome it.  It should be noted that Teleport Foe has a base recharge time of 20 seconds, easily enhanced to well under 10 seconds.  There are four turrets per pillbox that have to be destroyed and each one has very high resistance to all damage types and a *lot* of hit points.  But technically he's right so good job to you, sir.

That covers the counters he gave that have some merit.  There are a couple of other things he mentioned that don't.  There are no Accolades that provide TP protection.  I would invite him to name the one he thinks does.  While it's true that Teleport Foe has an accuracy check, Defense powers (those that lower the opponent's chance to hit as opposed to Resistance powers which are those that reduce damage) offered very little protection due to the way game mechanics worked at the time.  Without getting into the complexities of exactly how hit checks worked in CoX (Accuracy was a separate stat from To Hit, for example.  It was pretty non-intuitive) it was very easy to overcome Defense in PvP.  Myer's various Twixt characters had access to Build Up, Tactics, Insight inspirations amongst other abilities that easily overwhelmed even the highest Defense when stacked.  The problem was so bad that when PvP was redesigned as part of Issue 13 (aka: the issue when Twixt bailed out on the game because his tactic became much more difficult to accomplish), changing the way the hit formulas work in PvP so Defense wasn't so easy to overcome was one of the priorities.

As for smarts, I realize no one could possibly hope to rival his own intellect so I'd love to hear what other tactics could be used besides all the other ones already listed.  Oh, you mean that was just included as a cheap shot to imply people are just too stupid to beat him and it wasn't because of an enormous game mechanics advantage he was abusing?  Sorry, I'm not smart enough to have picked up on that.  Then again, I'm not the one who's had a pillbox stolen right out from under my nose by a Stalker that had to be visible for 10 seconds to do it.

Edit: If he's going to nitpick, so can I. /shrug

Maybe you should post this admission for us, instead of telling me about it, the wordiness of this thread is enough without having to trawl through external ones.

"The chilling text shook Myers two years ago. It served as a telling detail for his ongoing study of social customs in Internet gaming communities.

At the time of his clash with Syphris, Myers was just three months into an in-depth behavioral study of the "City of Heroes/Villains"" online community. Already, someone had threatened to unearth his real identity and take his life."


That's what I'm going on and it's definitely the most logical assertion here, I'm not even gonna entertain your last comment it's so ludicrous.

Can douchebaggery eventually evolve into a new social norm? Of course. It doesn't mean that you should be surprised that initially people will call you a douchebag for it, however.

My main annoyance at this is that it's being expressed in the stupid form of "look, people who play VIDEO games have social constructs and get all pissy when I violate them!" instead of the rather obvious removal of VIDEO, or even games, and understanding that the study of social constructs, the evolution of social rules of behavior and such are all fascinating and worthy of study.

But what isn't worthy of study is the blindingly obvious when not backed up by any scientific method or even seeming to start as an experiment, and starring the researcher. At this point, the study has about as much of a scientific basis on the study of cultural reactions to situations outside the social norm as Borat. While it could be interesting, it's more entertaining due to it's complete lack of any meaningful data correlation.

DMeyers, Jul 09, 2009 at 22:09

From Lum's link, where he defends himself against people assaulting the scientific value of his study. Essentially that he violated pretty much every rule for a study he possibly could. At that point he cops to it not really being an experiment.

The simplest answer: he was being a douchebag and violating the social norms of the social group he was playing a game with. He wrote down his experiences. He then calls it an experiment, promptly regrets calling it that, and the reality is he was a douchebag who wrote the equivalent of a blog about it.

Yes that just refers to fact it wasn't an "experiment" which means he used the wrong wording but this is only a self-deconstruction of what he was actually doing, investigative journalism or research for a case study whatever you want to call it. This doesn't take away from the fact that being a douchebag is not a logical answer, why was he being a douchebag? people aren't just douchebags there's a reasoning behind it, in fact I would call that more of a conspiracy theory. He was a douchebag because his dog just died etc. opens up assumptions so Occam's Razor can't apply to that.

Although I can see some of points being made he seemed to take particular glee in what he was doing, so he was probably a douchebag that found a logical reason to behave like one. Again though this is only an assumption on my part.

Since it keeps being missed, there is not a single review board in this country (or many others) that would approve of this as a study the way it was conducted.

It was most definately not scholarly research.

By that way, now that I've had time to read it more it looks like a great conversation going on over there at Terra Nova.  A lot of people in that discussion get (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2009/07/twixt.html?cid=6a00d8341c022953ef011570f28e65970c#comment-6a00d8341c022953ef011570f28e65970c) it (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2009/07/twixt.html?cid=6a00d8341c022953ef011570f9eaed970c#comment-6a00d8341c022953ef011570f9eaed970c).

That doesn't make it illogical just means he broke the mould.

Myers' post history on the CoH boards is far older than 2 years. The newspaper quote above is incorrect. He may have been calling it a study by then but he was playing CoH (and posting on their forums) since at least 2004.

As pointed out in the comment thread for the newspaper article, the reporter failed to do any actual research on this story at all, such as contacting any of the people Dr. Myers interacted with or NCsoft itself. To put it mildly, the Times-Picayune doesn't have a reputation for stellar reporting standards.

Registered on 06/21/04 10:33 AM

Fasque was his forum name.  He used to like to post about his exploits there in the form of bad poetry.  Sadly, almost all of his old posts have been lost to forum maintenance.

Edit:

They can PM me here.  :drillf:

I'm really failing to see how the simple answer to the guy is "it's all secretly another study" and not "for whatever reason, he likes playing in a way that the social construct of his chosen game considers to be bad behavior"

Can't someone just be antisocial? His posting on TN seems to indicate someone who just HATES the idea of social constructs and social lubrication rules. Sure, we can get into the idea that maybe that's all an act, too, but that seems rather complicated and runs directly contrary to everything he posts.

He archived his poetry. (http://dmyersloyola.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/cohv-archive/)

It kind of does.  Review boards exist to make certain that:

1. Research has value and
2. Research conforms to certain ethical standards

I have no idea why you are defending him Amarr, he is the worst kind of douche, one who can't accept the consequences of his actions.  I (and I'm pretty sure you) have engaged in plenty of "griefing" behavior in EvE, but we both accepted that folks weren't going to like us for it.  That's the whole point!  To generate a reaction!

Ya think?

Just cause the review board doesn't think it of value doesn't mean it isn't of value, that's why conforming to these governing bodies isn't always the answer. As 10101011 said earlier he tried to do something similar and got knocked back. I can't tell you whether it's valuable research as I haven't investigated it further but I do think it's an interesting topic and has obviously struck a small chord in the gaming community, so from that perspective it holds some value. I'm not really whiteknighting him, but I am definitely not agreeing with some of the ad hominem being thrown around, it remains to be seen for me whether he's a douchebag or not.

I don't grief, it implies doing something without any reasoning just to piss someone off. I did a fair amount suicide ganking cause I was really well skilled for it and it was highly profitable. I did take some enjoyment out of it at the same time, but generally only if the other person was a douchebag after I did it. Sometimes people were nice to me and I helped them out a little but very rarely, as they were likely just douchebags metagaming to get their stuff back.

The fuck?

The boards don't exist to determine the value, they exist to make sure it's ethical.  Were he really trying to turn this into an actual study and bypassed the board, his tenure would be up for review.  It's not a matter one can just skirt because the board "doesn't get it".

He isn't interested in research though, he's interested in writing a book.  For that he can write down whatever gibberish he wants and obtain the materials in whatever fashion he wants.  He just hopes to fool people about it's value by saying he 'studied' the matter.  From a scholarly perspective it is absolute rubbish, yet you're buying into it.

Who cares what this so called review board thinks? He's welcome to write a book as far as I'm concerned. I'm also not necessarily buying into it, but I sure ain't buying into the fact that a 50 odd year old Loyola Professor would continually get his rocks off griefing some idiots in a Superhero game, unless he was doing it for some external purpose

You think people magically stop being assholes once they hit 50?

You gotta give it up for artful trolling.

There's an age limit on griefing?  There exists some very mean-spirited, spiteful people and some very large egos in academia.

One of the first things you discover when working in MMOs is that the stereotype of the grief player as a whiny teenager in their parents' basement is wrong.

A month after DAOC shipped, we had a middle-aged lawyer who burned his frequent flier miles to fly out to our office to demand in person that his banning be revoked. (I'm fairly certain it wasn't.)

Depends on what your meaning of griefing is here, if you mean the pure sense that there is no obvious reason just for pure lols, then I would say yes, but this is not necessarily to do with age you're leaving out the college professor part. If you were to say he hated his students so went home and griefed a load of people who he considered a similar mindset/age bracket in an attempt to let off a bit of steam, then I would say it's quite possible but only an assumption.

I think the point is that assholes come in all shapes, sizes, and educational backgrounds. 

Ok if you are gonna simplify it, why would he behave like an asshole then?

Cuz he's an asshole? Maybe a bored asshole? Maybe a bored asshole who thinks he can make some money talking about video games? Sanity is not a reigning characteristic amongst academics of any age.

Many people can only feel better about themselves by stepping on the heads of others.  This can be by insults, physical abuse, berating, griefing, etc. 

Hell, you can see examples of this daily in the Politics forums on these very boards. 

As was pointed out earlier, his postings seem to indicate a hatred of the idea of social constructs and social lubrication rules.  What better way to express that than to shit all over said constructs in an MMO.

Just out of curiosity because i know next to nothing about sanctified methods of research... what would be the "proper" way to test how people react in situations where someone is breaking for prolonged time a social norm they've grown used to take for granted? I mean, people in comments are raising objections the subjects were not informed beforehand and the practice wasn't stopped as soon as they requested it, but wouldn't either of these things affect the results?

Or to step back and use his own study's general point:

Why not just be an asshole for no reason? Nothing actually says you can't just be a raging douchebag for no reason.

Really though, I'm sure there's always a reason for every asshole. But do we really want to take a trek down imagining his childhood to find out where he was touched? Or can we simply accept in this case that he apparently dislikes social constructs for ____ unknown reason, and as a result, he enjoyed fucking with the social construct in a game.

Have to side with "sometimes a dick is just a dick."  Even if it was something he was researching, that doesn't dismiss the dick scenario.  He could very well have decided to do this research as justification (to himself) to be a dick.

Slow news month or something?

tl;dr version:
Bad game design and assholes - crapping on your MMO since 199X.
Assholes - crapping on you for a lot longer than that.
Somehow these revelations are shocking.

Given the reactions here and elsewhere I think the most salient point is that this reinforces yet again that when people say they want MEANINGFUL PVP (whatever that is) they don't really mean it.

I think the media interest stems mainly from the real life death threats he received which likely haven't been documented in this way before. Oh for sure you say we've all experienced this, but if we were to take those death threats as seriously as some of you are taking Myer's in game behaviour then a lot of people should also be on police record.

There is concept in research called "informed consent."  Informed consent requires that anytime you do a scientific study on human beings that human being must agree to the study and the risks associated with that study before hand.   Now if the case of many psychological studies folks can mislead the patient about the study in order to get results not possible in the absence of misleading (for example there are a famous series of studies related to human response to authority wherein test subjects were unaware of the studies true purpose).  But in any event the subject must be AWARE there is being a study conducted and give their CONSENT to participate.  Anything else is considered unethical and grounds for sanction (including criminal sanctions).

Now you can OBSERVE all you like without informing subjects, but as soon as you the researcher start fucking with them you HAVE to have informed consent.  This is not optional, this is not him being a likeable rogue outside the system.   This is him violating one of the basic tenants of ethical research behavior.  That's why he backpedaled so quickly, if his administration found out he was doing this shit and claiming it is "research" they would fire him so fast it would make your head spin.  Tenure does not protect you from ethics violations.  

See: Tuskegee experiments.

Ammarr now you are just being disingenuous.  We aren't talking about his in game behavior, we are talking about the crap he is spewing in an interview and claiming is "research."

Remove the ginourmous chip from your shoulder.

This is a crock of shit, true research can't be carried out and gain accurate results under this premise. Why well the test subject will always behave differently when they are aware they are under scrutinsation.
 

I wasn't referring to this discussion ITT I was referring to why the media had taken such an interest. Also I don't know where you get the chip on your shoulder idea from, does everyone who argues against you have a chip on their shoulder?

I feel the medieval group mentality closing in here, "he doesn't agree with us flame him, he's a non believer".

Well them I am glad you are not now and will never be a scientist who is involved with human research. As someone who is directly involved with human clinical trials I can tell you unambiguously: you're frighteningly wrong.
 

"Help, help I'm being repressed."  

The Society is such a bully.

I'm in your thread destroying your social constructs  :grin:

Just wanted to jump in and say this guy didn't deserve 6 pages let alone one page of attention.

:ye_gods:

Yes, yes they can. You have to craft your studies carefully, and you occasionally have to misdirect people as to the purpose of the study, but many studies are successfully carried out with these rules in place. Ethics are a bitch, but we've seen the alternative, and it is terrifying.

I'm glad you're doing clinical trials and not sociology or anthropology, cause then you would find you are the one who is wrong.

You have gone Grunk level crazy.   :heartbreak:

Don't sociology and anthropology generally study large populations through observation only? I honestly don't know, that's what it seems like they would do.

There's a big difference between watching a bear to see how it lives and kicking a bear in the balls to see what it will do.

Indeed, but they definitely don't involve administering drugs to old people so it's impossible to say "I do clinical trials I know what I'm talking about". Also I'm sure there are other forms of research that this could come under but none involve using medicine.


Bears aren't human, noone got hurt.


Yeh cause I'm the one trying to compare (alleged) analytical studies of human behaviour in a virtual playground to human drug testing, maybe you should give me some of yo shit so I can think more clearly.

The accurate comparison isn't drug testing, it is psych testing. His poking at players could bring up issues in the unwilling test subjects that could cause permanent damage to the subject or others. Say he gets someone riled up with his taunting. Said person goes and punches his wife/kid because he has aggression issues. For some reason ethics committees have an issue with that. Fucking liberals.

DON'T HURT THE BEARS  :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear:

What sociological or anthropological studies are you performing that makes you more qualified to determine that he's wrong?  Besides the one you're performing in this thread right now, I mean.

Just a side note on IRBs. Their authority has expanded somewhat over the years, to the point that a lot of scholars are beginning to find them intrusive. But in theory, they govern experimental research on human subjects and nothing else. So, for example, a philosopher doesn't have to apply to an IRB if he's studying the relevance of Kant to arguments about "just war" theory used in the case of the Iraq War. A literary critic doesn't have to apply to an IRB if she's working on a biography of a modernist poet. A historian doesn't have to apply to an IRB if he's reading medieval documents.

Also IRBs vary from campus to campus, though there's something of a centrally mandated standard.

So studying a digital game is kind of a grey area. If you're writing about it as a media studies critic, no IRB. If you're conducting psychological experiments on visual perception in 3d environments, you definitely need an IRB.

If you're claiming you were experimenting on people by griefing them, IRB would probably be required. If you were just acting like a griefer and then writing a memoir or journalistic account, comparable to Julian Dibbell's book on gold farming where he explored the subject partly by experiencing the RMT trade, you could probably argue you didn't need an IRB. But the latter mode of research is not very common in most academic fields, and anybody pursuing it needs to be really careful about saying that they're not doing rigorous social science.

Look, if you want people to talk games and not politics, maybe just let conversations about games go where they will, as long as they're not going into Den-able territory.

Really, no, he hasn't. A lot of cultural anthropologists and others using ethnographic methods argue that they're not human subjects research in the sense that IRBs were meant to have authority over. There's a really active and sometimes ferocious debate about exactly this subject going on in academia. No one disagrees that experimentation of any kind requires human subjects review. Ethnography is not experimental.

It seems like the difference in this case his action to provoke a response. If he ran around looking for griefers and watching how people responded to them that would be one thing. He kicked the bear in the balls himself though to see what the reaction would look like. Are ethnographers running into villages and purposefully causing shitstorms just to see how the locals respond? That seems unlikely.

Not usually, no. But ethnographers do participate as well as observe, that's key to what they're doing. I don't think what Myers was doing was ethnography, though: he was too active, without that key sense of stepping back, keeping distance. I have no problem with someone writing in a more memoir-ish, journalistic vein (I think Dibbell's stuff is great)--but one of the key things there is that you had better be an interesting person yourself or you had better have a lot of perspective on what you're doing. Not sure this researcher has either.

Not only did he do it once and let it go, he kept doing it.  He continued to provoke people who were already upset.

It wasn't a sociological or anthropological study based on observation, it was based on "What happens if I stir the hornets' nest?  Repeatedly?"  It falls much more under a psyche study where unwitting people were co-opted for his 'experiment'.  Sure he could study the resulting sociological implications, but only if you completely ignore that he was the cause of shifting social dynamics by acting maliciously against individuals.

It is a lot different to be an observer than an active participant.  There are ways that he could have gotten around this if he had truly been interested in research.

This is very true and very annoying for multi-center studies as often you need to get individual IRB approval from each participating site.  Still I can't imagine a study wherein you are interacting with humans beyond observational that does NOT require IRB approval.  All that 7up stuff required IRB approval and it is minimally intrusive.

Edit: for the non-science folk IRB = Institutional Review Board.  They are the body at every institution that does human research that approves such research and makes sure it conforms to ethical standards.

this thread needs good ole fashioned Haemish

It wouldn't take a PHD in anthropology to see that "informed consent" doesn't work very well in this scenario, you could just watch one episode of Big Brother to see how group social experiments behave differently under the microscope (I only ever watched one episode I hate that show).

FTFY

Amarr, if you need an example of what amiable is talking about when he says there are reasons you have to have ethical review (without Godwinning this, which we totally could at this point) even for behavioral experiments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

There seems to be a grey area here, then... are you saying if there was some third party doing the griefing instead, he could write down what'd amount to the same observations/conclusions and that'd be all legal, even though no one was informed they're being studied and without need to consent etc?

I'm not I understand why it can be an unethical approach in a lot of circumstances, but I just think it produces less accurate results. What I am saying is that someone conducting an experiment within the confines of a virtual world albeit a quasi social one, is a whole lot different to performing medical tests on people in the real world. Also in that prison experiment they should have added real prisoners and dropped a few bars of soap to give those Stanford boys a feel for the real thing.

In academic terms that's absolutely correct. You can learn things from watching gorillas in the wild, and you can learn things by interacting directly with Koko, but the later case has a lot more caveats and problems that you have to work out both ethically and just experimentally. When he jumped in and just started pushing people's buttons, he was essentially poisoning the well experimentally. Any of his conclusions are extremely suspect simply because of his methods.

I personally don't see why we should hit him with unethical banner to belittle his work, seems a bit didactic. With more research in how to draw people into games to create enjoyment, more research could be done to see how this drawing power might also have negative effects. I mean it's possible that a thirteen year old kid could have been doing this and if it indeed is the cause of such mental anguish, then surely it's the developers/designers who should be accountable for allowing it to proceed.

Yes, that is correct.


It's a professional ethics issue.  This is NOT research.  He is calling it research to make himself sound important and relevant.  It is missing other hallmarks of research beyond just ethical approval (controls, experimental design, a hypothesis, etc...)   It's just one dude being a jackass and hiding behind a "oh I'm doing 'research'" defense. 

That's also been covered here though. If it was a rules violation: ban. If it was a soft rule: warn on forums. Developers have no way of easily telling whether someone is 13 or 39 or 59, whether they're a student, teacher, or researcher. They can datamine the stats, read the logs, and invisible-monitor.

This kind of things I feel like goes back to that adage that you can't ever watch something without affecting it in some form.

The guys a maverick he pissed off some gamers, there was an outcry heard across the virtual universe and every review board in the country is up in arms  :why_so_serious:

This is his previous work seems to have a fair amount under his belt to suggest it wasn't a whimsical thing or an afterthought,

http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/research_goals.html

According to that this is what he was working towards,

http://game.itu.dk/player/index.html

For what it's worth, HHS has guidelines up for an IRB. I don't know how binding they are legally, but Meyer's work would have been up for an exemption to informed consent simply by virtue of having an abysmally low chance of harm to the subjects, which is about the only exemption to informed consent. An IRB would still need to say it's okay, however.

But beyond the consent issue, he seemed to have absolutely no scientific methods for this study to prove anything. Where's the control group to compare results against? Does he have a detailed daily log of event->reaction, event->reaction? Or are we just supposed to take the summary and assume it's all kosher on the back end? Was there anyone assigned to monitor him during the experiment, to make sure he wasn't compromised/compromising the experiment since he was an active part of it? Bleh, it just fails pretty much everything. Imagine if a student turned these results into him for a class, the student would get reamed.

Anyways, it's further complicated by his history of performing the same activities (based on his forum archived posts) far prior to the study's beginning, which implies he was compromised before ever starting the study. Essentially he couldn't have a control, since he's just logging "this is my life" with no comparison to the same situations without triggers (if he didn't trash talk/respond in broadcast on a different character, what changed? How did the social dynamic work if he had yet another character who adhered to the social norms? etc)

I just read some of those articles.  :ye_gods:

I actually came back to this page to do exactly that.  I was going to put a Dr. Mengele (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Mengele) spin on it. :awesome_for_real:


1. Useful conclusions cannot be drawn, because a) it didn't start with any critical thinking or controls and b) it really doesn't illustrate or explain any behaviour that you could not also observe by browsing the fucking WoW realm forums.  Really, the guy has contributed to the field what amounts to a picture with a "Dis kid is pist" caption.

2. I haven't seen any evidence that NCSoft was actually made aware of his "experiment" (the verbal abuse, however, was reported), so even accepting your "but you cannot get permission from the players!" objection which lands you securely in Godwin territory he's still failed to even notify the people who's sandbox he's shitting in.

3. The company is responsible for some random fucker being a cunt?  Uhh... No.

1) I haven't read the paper, so you may be right.

2) Surely that's up to the players who are agrieved to report it not the griefer. Maybe part of his criteria was to see how the company would react?

3) Nope if you read a bit closer instead of jumping on the bandwagon, I think the company is responsible if some part of the game mechanics allow griefing as to cause distress such as mental anguish (this was discussed earlier I don't necessarily agree with it), I wasn't necessarily saying they were accountable in this particular instance.

On one hand people are saying he was an asshole cause he virtually caused literal pain and distress to people and this was unethical and then other people are saying noone took a blind bit of a notice, make up your minds peoples.

Really? Who said that in this thread?

In any event amarr it's pretty obvious you have an agenda, for the life of me I can't figure out what it is and why you are white knighting this douche other than you exhibit similar behavior and have taken affront at us calling it douchee.

Edit:


No one said this either.  We just said he was acting like a jerk. 

When rebuttals can't be found, character assassination always works.

Please, folks have tried to reason with you for 4 pages, you are obviously trolling at this point.  I know you must be deeply wounded.

I'm not, I just don't agree with you on everything no need to call me a douchebag about it.

I never called you a douchebag.  I called certain behavior douchee.  Feeling guilty? :grin:

Nope  :awesome_for_real:

You should be though shame on you.

It does not matter if it produces less accurate results.  If informed consent does not happen, manipulating participants' is against all ethics.  Chosing to ignore it is not an option.

That is incorrect.  There are many times in which Informed Consent can be modified or even waived completely. It is the norm for most research, but there are circumstances that research cannot be conducted with knowing subjects. To assume research conducted without it is unethical is ludicrous. 

The PHRC themselves will waive them as long as there is minimal risk to the subject, it will not adversely affect the rights or welfare of the subjects, the research cannot be conducted with informed consent, and whenever possible, full disclosure is given after such research.

It's all just research to see how you'd respond.  :why_so_serious:

"Research diary:

Dear diary, forum poster tried to oppose me, but I was just too skilled in my arguments."

Sure, but that still requires approval by an IRB/some type of review board.  You as the researcher do not get to decide when it is or isn't appropriate to waive informed consent.  As I stated originally there are examples especially in psych studies, where the subjects do not have complete informed consent (they are misled because it is necessary to the experiment), but those types of experiments (at lest in my experience) ALWAYS require approval from a review board.   If you find this isn't the case please cite examples.  Edit:  Last line isn't a slam I'm genuinely curious since the only studies I am involved with involve putting a foreign substance into a human being there is never an instance when informed consent is not required, I'm basing my psych knowledge off of friends in Psych programs in graduate school who sometimes had difficulty getting human subject experiments through their IRB.

Could someone in the industry answer my question about why it was impossible to either (1) fix the exploit, or (2) have an intern take 15 seconds to post on the boards saying it is not allowed? 

A couple people have implied that Cryptic was busy and couldn't possibly have done (1) ever, but (2) takes 15 seconds of intern manpower. 

Again:  as we weep over the poor victims, why aren't we blaming Cryptic?  Why aren't they the villain here? 

More like lack of.

You've said this multiple times before it doesn't make it any more palatable, no matter which way you word it. We're talking computer games here not a real world scenario, I don't believe for a minute any real anguish could be caused. In other words I ain't buying it stop with this ridiculous line of reasoning.

I think this is the best summing of the griefer mentality I've seen.

I'm just gonna paraphrase my angle on this as some of you seem to think I'm siding with him which I ain't.
Do I think he's taking a cheapshot at the gaming community, yes I agree with that part to some extent. Was it worth outlining the death threats he received and bringing it to media, also yes gotta make sure developers take a hardline on this sort of behaviour we don't become desensitized, brush it under the carpet "oh it happens" don't worry about it. Did he start acting like a douchebag and then say hey I'll turn this into a paper for those cheeky Scandinavians, I would say unlikely but he seemed to take more enjoyment out of it than he should have. Should we care that it was unethical, nope we are a gaming community not a review board.

Psychologists would disagree with you.

I also think they would say people who feel genuine pain and loss from a computer game are compensating, but that's a whole different debate.

I agree, and from what I can find, every time someone asks Myers about an IRB, he snubs them. (At one time he became a grammar nazi, and spent a large paragraph insulting the questioner.)  My statement wasn't in any way a defense of this prick, it was more a counter to a blanket statement.  To be honest, I really don't know whether online participant/observational research needs an IRB but from the way he dodges the question, I suspect it might.

It's not real research if it's retarded.  This 'study' only targets (as we understand them on this board) a niche demographic of internet nerds that aren't really representative of the world at large - or even the mmo playing world.  Part of doing research is having a large sample and a control.  There's also no control.  Therefore, this 'study' is just a journalistic anecdote which, in no way can be considered scientific.  The fact that he presents it as such is douche-a-rific.

This guy's just pwning noobs and then publishing something - anything - for his resume.

http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=340

Does sound like his research is pretty lame. Though I think the idea of how players create their own subset of rules within a game is an interesting topic and something we are actually dealing with in certain other games, especially when this construct is flawed.

1) Fixing the exploit wasn't done because a) it wasn't seen as a high priority, b) CoH/V teleport functionality only works in a binary (off or on) state in maps and for entities afaik and c) it's PvP in CoH/V, which was a micro-community anyway who were left in the wilderness a lot of the time anyway.

2) There's been some mixed messages about whether or not this was allowed, but the devs / CMs have said previously that if you go into a PvP zone, expect to get PvPed and that it might not be fair.

Cryptic Paragon Studios / NCsoft could have banned him. They didn't. He was a minor griefer in a micro-community that is getting 15 minutes of fame. The most incredible thing has been seeing the general CoH/V community getting worked up about anything PvP related, because most of the time it's LOL PvP.

Look, again, not all scholarship is scientific in its aims. If an academic wants to write a memoir, or an interpretation of a literary work, or a philosophical argument, it doesn't have to conform to science. Even ethnography as a method can be quite rigorous without being "scientific".  In fact, some social science is kind of a parody of natural science at times, striving for a degree of certainty that a good deal of natural science doesn't aspire to. There are branches of natural science that don't involve experimentation, even branches which are largely theoretical or abstract; many experimental studies in natural science rest on probablistic or approximate evidence.

You can study one person and write an interesting account of their life or experience. Historians call that biography  :oh_i_see:. Of course even a biographer needs an intelligent, knowledgeable understanding of how typical or representative the person they're writing about might be. But anything can be interesting or important if the right person is thinking about it, even "griefers in City of Heroes". If you were going to define "good research" as "the most typical, widespread or representative social phenomena", then all social science would be about norms: you wouldn't want to study drug addiction (it's not typical); you wouldn't want to study minority populations (they're not typical); etc. You wouldn't want to study experiences or practices that aren't densely documented (you can't have a good 'scientific' sample size), and so on.

There's plenty to dislike about Myers' work without holding him accountable to a potted and unrealistic standard for "good social science".

Studying the social rules which develop in games is absolutely fascinating.  Studying 'griefing' behavior is interesting in itself.

It's purely his methods, and trying to claim them as research, which infuriates me.  If he had said he was doing it as a private citizen 'cause he liked to fuck with people and is now writing a book I'd say he's an asshole, shrug my shoulders, and move on.

All that is fine, but he's presenting it as if it were science.

BOOM.  This should have been the second post in the thread, and then thread closed. 

And if this thread were discussing the appropriateness of PvP in a PvP zone then that point would be relevant.  Had you bothered to read the thread that is not what we are discussing, what we are discussing are his claims that this was a "scientific experiment."

But I guess every PvP discussion has a certain group of people who will scream "DON'T YOU JUDGE ME!!!!!!" whether or not it is the topic of conversation. 

What the fuck are you talking about.

Fake science isn't science.  I don't think any of the things you describe are science.  The fact that some academic fuckwit gets away with publishing it because he's 'from a university' means dick.

Be honest.  You just felt like contradicting someone on the internet.

Because Paragon (not Cryptic, who no longer has anything to do with CoH) considered it not an exploit, as it was theoretically possible to use skill choices or temporary buffs to counteract TP foe.

The point isn't that it was an exploit, it was that it was 'griefy'. The two are not always the same thing.


Normally, it would be. However, the subject of his paper wasn't "CoH players complaining about how evil PvP player PKed them", it was "CoH players turned me into an outcast and threatened me in real life because I didn't play by their community's rules". Sorry to interrupt your RespondToPvPThread.macro script.

People feel pain and loss when their football team loses.  Everyone has something in their lives they care about. Knock over their sand castle and they get upset. It's not rocket surgery to understand this.

Yes people usually go to see their psychologist because their football team just lost or some insane maniac went wild on their carefully constructed sandcastles.


I don't think he feels particularly indebted to anyone. MMO's are designed that the minute you stop playing for good you aren't part of the world anymore, so anything you did in said world is also left behind. In some way his book forced him to break his anonymity unless of course he wrote under a different name, but I guess he values his work. Also no point in getting worked up about some academic schmuck he ain't worth it and if he was a true griefer that's what he'd really want.

There's a pretty wide gulf between "I feel some anguish over X" and "X has caused me to become such a demented psychotic that I now require psychiatric treatment."  Plenty of people are a bit pissed off when their football team loses or they die in HALO or whatever, but still not in gibbering maniac territory.

Part of the issue with ethics in psych experiments is, obviously, "don't be a dick," but you also don't want to poison the well.  If you start pissing on the people who are showing up for your tests, soon the only people who show up are the ones who enjoy being pissed on, and that opens up a whole ton of selection biases.  Psych experiments are already suffering from problems with people showing up trying to figure out what the "trick" is, it doesn't really help the field to have this kind of image floating around.

The "people don't suffer real anguish as a result of online interactions" has long been a weak argument. You can either look at probably the penultimate summary of such an event - "A Rape In Cyberspace" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace) - or consider that griefers are generally stomped on by CM because it is well recognised that they drive people from the game.

Ultimately what will probably happen 10 years from now, barring someone writing an official refutation of Myers' account, is that his view will be seen as what happened, just like Fansy is taken as being what happened during his time. My issue is that Myers' might be whitewashing his account to some degree to make himself look better than reality; I have more of an issue with the newspaper article than the paper.

Kail noone mentioned psychiatrists stop godwinning and Unsub it's not an argument created to imply griefing is ok, it's an argument to say that it would have passed a review board because his actions wouldn't fall under the header " causing real mental anguish or distress". Noone is saying being griefed is not a horrible experience or annoying, but you can't compare it to anything that happens in the real world.

No, it's not.  If a review board discovered a researcher was carrying out trials without informed consent on human beings that researcher would be f-ed.  I don't care if he was giving them a glass of water and saying pleasant, supportive things to study the "effect of pleasant conversation on water consumption."  If you are conducting non-observational "research" you need IRB approval first.  Whether or not you passed review is immaterial, you are violating your ethics obligations simply by conducting the research without review.

 :awesome_for_real: how did this simple grief practice get so escalated this much. Holy shit. Someone pulled my Chosen to Warhammer Scenario faction guards everytime but no one said a damn thing at WAR boards. Just because some asshole wrote a paper based on it doesn't change anything. It's a cheesy pvp tactic, lots of ppl think it's wrong to use it, but the devs didn't remove it. I don't for one moment think the analogies you give like 'spitting in chess matches' 'dunking 100 points vs handicaps' as even valid, but it sure is damn funny to read.

Because we're not talking about PvP and whether or not teleporting people into drones is a clever?

I work in academia.  This smuck's professional conduct has implications on the public's perceptions of research.

Stop trolling, he wasn't carrying out trials on human beings he was fucking with their virtual avatars. Also noone here except you and Lantyssa because of her own vested interest seems to give a shit about what a review board thinks of his work, this is a gaming community go whine about it on some academic forum somewhere.

It becomes an issue when he starts trying to publish academic papers about it.  Which he did in this case.   Which is the point of this discussion.

You know what this discussion is like?  It is like trying to talk about a point in the Koran and every third post having some idiot chime in "Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Saviour!  Muslims are wrong!  You should all be Christians!!!!!"   That's very nice, but let's assume for a second that there A.  is a Koran and B.  Some people believe in it.  So hey can we have a conversation about it without listening to your proselytizing?

We get it, you are in the Church of "Everything goes in PvP!!!"  Hey some of us our members, but that's not we are talking about here.  Since the scope of knowledge of some folks in this thread appears to be Church of PvP (may all noobs be pwned, blessed be he who is 1337) that seems to be the response.  I'm sorry if I don't take you seriously Amarr, but when you cite your working knowledge of "Big Brother" as justification on your views about informed consent....  Well, let's just say even with this I am holding my tongue. 

Hey, look, the disconnect in one sentence.

 :awesome_for_real:

How many threads do we get to have that devolve into threads we've had before?

Read that again idiot  :awesome_for_real:

Or maybe learn to read.

Look who's Godwin now.

/Inigo Montoya on
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
/Inigo Montoya off

Hint:  Cite the number of times I used the word "Hitler" in the above paragraph.

People who turn gaming threads into religious conversations are just a newer form of Godwin in my book.

Yeah, shouldn't that pretty much kill the thread at this point? If you don't get that behind the virtual avatars are people with real feelings and troubles, well then  :ye_gods: :uhrr: :uhrr: :uhrr: :ye_gods:

Amarr is just admitting he only plays MMO via bot software. There aren't any people playing those character, they're all just complex macros!

That hurts I've got real feelings and troubles ya know.

I'm not entirely sure that's true.

is this an example of Politics forum leaking into Games?

Well if I did, how would you feel attacking my personality like this? It's ok to be a dick to someone on a forum but not in a game? Hypocritical much?

I'm just pointing out the irony I'm not really hurt.

Am I the only one who always found this story sorta pathetic, and who thinks the sane reaction would have been "lol hax" instead of "omg CYBER RAEP!" or whatever?

Okay, I'm pretty sure I didn't mention Jesus or anything though.  Unless your religion is Scientology, I don't see how conflating psychiatry with psychology has anything to do with Godwin.  Nor am I really sure how it kills my argument, but if you want, just change it back:

There's a pretty wide gulf between "I feel some anguish over X" and "X has caused me to become such a demented psychotic that I now require psychological counseling."  Plenty of people are a bit pissed off when their football team loses or they die in HALO or whatever, but still not in gibbering maniac territory.

Happy?  I assumed you were getting stuck in a false dichotomy, or something, rather than just saying that it doesn't count "because they're pussies!"  My mistake, I guess.

I had never really heard about it before, so when Unsub referred to it as the "penultimate summary of such an event", I was expecting something that had bigger repercussions than just making someone cry.  I'd have to imagine that victims of actual rape would be a little pissed to see the word attached to something like this.

I found this story completely pathetic, not just sorta pathetic. 

I had a field day reading that, the moral of the story was the cyberrapist became a cultural icon on the site and the unnamed person who cried noone really gave a shit about.

Also...
"Over a decade later, these events remain the primary advertisement for LambdaMOO."

Yes I take it back you weren't really godwinning but you definitely fell into my sarchasm :grin:

Edit: Oh nevermind this is getting absurd.

If you had feelings and I personally attacked you I'd feel bad about myself. Conveniently I'm only conversing with your virtual avatar, so I'm in the clear! :awesome_for_real:

Now if I tried to write a paper and dubbed it research about my dickish trolling, then I'd be a hypocrite. Clearly I didn't make my point clear earlier. He can be as big a raging douche online as he wants. That's his prerogative. When he tries to call it research and get it published in some form, then I take exception.

Of course real rape ~= virtual rape.

Hopefully you checked out the full story (http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html), not just the wiki.

Here's the point though: if it makes you cry, makes you not want to go back into the world, makes the community reshape / reform and causes the rules of the game to be re-written, it has an impact. It's obvious in hindsight that someone would come in and break the social rules (especially if you could control another persons character) that made the community work because they could, but 16 years ago things were thought of differently. And the main impact on the MOO became "this is the place the rape happened", which tarnished its reputation (admittedly while keeping it alive).

There's a ton of lessons in the story for any MMO developer about griefing and community interaction, but also most of all the griefer will see it as "just a game" while his victims will think of the event very differently.

You know...  I've accidentally walked into few nasty fart clouds that had an impact on my feelings too.

Sorry about that.  :uhrr:

Not all academics are scientists. Rather a lot of them aren't, in fact. All of the disciplines in the humanities are strongly non-scientific. Some social analysis doesn't claim to be scientific. Some natural scientists will tell you that even the "hard" social sciences like economics are not really scientific.

But it's true that Myers is trying to pass off his work as empirical social science rather than as humanistic commentary.

Fuck that. I've said my peace on this idiocy. My tolerance for retreading the semantic definition of griefing dickplay vs. honest academic research is right around threshhold of watching spider monkeys pick peanuts out of their dung.

They do that?

FIFY

~= means "approximately equal to" in this context.

!= means "not equal to"

Thanks. My SPSS syntax experience is to blame, along with my head cold. 

Wow, this thread sucks ass.

This coming from an Eve Online 'griefer'. It will get better once I publish my azzraping experiences research.

I bet you could get a grant to get that shit published!!