Transgressive Behavior

The curious case of the poorly behaved professor continues, as in his blog, he poses the question – was his CoH’s character’s behavior in violating social norms while remaining within the letter of the game’s rules “worthy of wrath”? I’ll let you remain in suspense as to how he’d answer that… oh, wait.

I can only note that all the things Twixt is accused of doing in descriptions like the above are simple, mundane, and easily mimicked in-game things that really aren’t much fun and really aren’t in the spirit of the game rules at all – game rules that Twixt championed and for which he was universally reviled; one can only wonder, if doing such simple and mundane things indeed encompasses the Twixt story, why there is a Twixt story at all?

But lets talk about something else.

So if you picked “he didn’t answer but immediately changed the subject”, you win! And what does he talk about? Why, the cavail heard from people called upon their bad behavior in online games since online games have existed – it’s the developers’ fault for allowing it to happen!

Game rules are prohibitive and paradoxical; social rules – most particularly the ones I observed in CoH — are authoritarian and static, inhibiting game play. With social rules in effect, the CoH game becomes less a game and more a society. There is less play and more politics.

The CoH game designers – and other mmo designers — seem to have largely abdicated their responsibility to design a game in favor of providing a sandbox for players to use as they wish. This may be good for game designer jobs, their blog readers, and their pocketbooks, but it is not particularly good for their games.

Well, I guess I was told. But in this awesomely compact non-sequitor of finger pointing, Myers explains neatly how little he understands the subject he purported to study. Something that almost any MMO player understands quickly enough – that MMOs tend to be both ‘games-as-directed-play’ and ‘games-as-sandbox’ or ‘games-as-community’ – the ancient “games vs. world” argument in MMO discussion, raging for decades, that Myers seems to have missed in his haunting of Recluse’s Victory merrily PKing. For someone who literally wrote a paper on the impact of online community behavior, this is… breathtaking. In his comments on the blog piece, Myers goes further:

The problem with the “meta-game” is that frequently that term is used to excuse all manner of bs exploits and advantages that not all players have equal access to.

This is precisely why the “meta-game” is sport games like football, for instance, is so closely monitored (salary caps, no taping other team’s practices, etc.) and codified.

Without the essential characteristics of a game — this includes the rules characteristics I mentioned early in this post — the meta-game is meta-bs. With those characteristics, it is a big game which, yes, we can call a meta-game if we wish to.

The very point of an MMO is that it is less a game and more a society. Without that society, an MMO is simply a game with particularly long and somewhat dumbed-down gameplay. If a designer ignores that society, s/he is ignoring the social connections that make an MMO unique. This is also not particularly good for their games, their continued employment, or their pocketbooks, although it may give them more time to update their blog.

But let’s talk about something else. Namely, the original topic that Myers skipped – was his behavior ‘worthy of wrath’?

The very act of asking this question is itself transgressive. “If I violate the social norms of a community I inhabit, while remaining within the letter of its laws, should I be condemned?”

Oddly, in the Times-Picayune article, Myers implies CoH players themselves are transgressive, by violating the social norms of the community *he* inhabits – making harassing threats. He admits in the original article that NCsoft responded to them appropriately – yet still takes the position they should have done more, by creating an environment where he could violate the norms of a community, and the community could then… respond? If it were just a game, of course, it wouldn’t be an issue, because Baldur’s Gate 2 NPCs rarely if ever smacktalk.

But it’s not, and there’s the issue. It’s a community, and one Myers derided and taunted, and then was shocked, *shocked* to learn that the community derided and taunted him in turn. And of course, Internet anonymity being what it is – and something any basic student of online gaming would be familiar with in picoseconds – much of that derision and taunting violated the norms of *his* community. Which he (properly) appealed to the authorities (NCsoft) who (properly) acted upon it, as he himself stated. At which point he then… wrote a research paper describing how, when faced with transgressive behavior, an online community will react badly. Again, this is not news to anyone who, say, has been on Xbox Live for more than 10 minutes.

Myers even implies that my previous blog posting was transgressive, since I quoted at length the commenters to the Times-Picayune article who had first-hand experience with his research methodology – the “anonymous wall of mob”. Well, if that’s the case, let’s go to the source himself. What does Twixt have to say about Twixt?

See for yourself. Let’s do some research!

First, we discover that what’s on offer is a considerably scrubbed version. The account has a post count of over 650, and only a small fraction of those are available. Odd coincidence that. The vast majority of these posts are years old, from before Issue 13’s PvP nerfs last December, which Twixt took great offense to:

The devs can take my jump away
Can take my speed, tp, and play
But here I root and stand amazed
That they don’t also take ur phase.

Shortly afterwards, in a common affliction of bored Killer archetypes, Twixt apparently gave up on the game and out of boredom, just decided to, well, be a dick.

Screw this – PVP sucks. I’m coming back in here to farm and gank the noobies, but if you think Im gonna stand there and slug it out with little to no chance of fleeing insurmountable odds, you must be dinko.

However, a pre-scrubbed version of Twixt’s transgressiveness is still available online, and requoted below in case it falls prey to another odd coincidence. The entire thread is a fantastic summation of the reaction to Twixt by those who encountered him, and contains the following response from the “droner” himself:

1. Twixt windup doll says…

* base is safe
* get moar phase
* hoho
* get moar vills
* vengence weenie alert!
* hoho
* always die when you leave, gives the other side hope
* watch the language kiddies
* hoho
* lag, adjusting

2.

01-03-2008 10:34:37 You have defeated make love
01-03-2008 10:39:02 You have defeated make love
(dozens of similar killshots deleted)
01-04-2008 22:30:39 You have defeated Mr MentaIity
01-04-2008 22:32:23 You have defeated Paul Radbot

3. Elf Stalker who? Never heard of him.

Yes, it’s hard to see why anyone would take offense to such a prized member of the CoH community.

For more background, you can go to Myers’ paper, Play and Punishment: The Sad And Curious Case of Twixt. It contains the following helpful explanation of droning:

Since RV is a two-faction (heroes vs. villains) game, there are safe areas within the zone where heroes and villains can enter and leave the zone without fear of being attacked. Protecting these safe areas (“bases”) are security drones, which, without recourse, vaporize members of the opposing faction and transport them back to their own base on the opposite side of the zone map. There is no game-imposed penalty for getting droned, nor is any reward given to a player whose opponent gets droned.

Except… that’s not right. The entire reason Twixt’s opponents were so enraged by his “droning” was that, unlike death to PvP opponents, death to NPCs imposes an XP penalty, which in CoH/V can be fairly punitive. Myers is wrong here on a very key point – not only is there a game-imposed penalty for being droned, it’s one of the most punitive penalties in the game.

So either Myers deliberately lied about this impact to justify his own case, or he didn’t fully understand the rules – the game rules, not the community rules – of the online community that he was studying.

Whichever option you choose to believe, both are… well, fairly transgressive.

(Late ninja edit: some have said that, at least as of now, deaths to drones do not impose XP debt. However, while this makes the above quote far less black-and-white a mistaken assertion, given that Myers as Twixt gleefully often did the same maneuver into NPC mobs which do, the larger points still stand.)

Freakazoid

So he basically went to the media with a disingenuous scientific study, all because he was butthurt over pvp changes?

Why yes, that does sound like every hardcore pvper’s wet dream, to stick it to the developers by making them look bad to people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
dmyers

Scott or Lum or whoever, Im still thinking, after all this, you haven’t read the paper.

Let me catch some things for you so you can change them if you like.

There is a much better summary of the Twixt doggerel here.

http://dmyersloyola.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/cohv-archive/

I keep the Twixt message chain on my own site as a reference point. In my paper, I mention somewhere when I began posting – as Twixt – on the CoH forums. In fact, the section you quote from is mentioned specifically as it contains a snippet of my kill log. My opponents denied I killed them before and after the kill log was posted btw – another example of how the social community attempted to distort and transform what was going on inside RV, particularly if it involved Twixt. (Similar, perhaps, to right now.)

You quote another little bit completely out of context. Here’s the full message.

http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/temp/FasqueMsg.jpg

Please, srsly, read the paper. You may find something of interest.
http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

I did read your paper. Care to comment on what I quoted from it?
dartwick

This is like taking all the food in a community garden because there is no explicit rule against it – then saying gardeners are mean because they get upset with you.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

Personally, I think the idea that MMORPGs can truly exist as societies is a bit of a pipe dream. MMORPGs don’t really produce the same results as a real society does – they don’t promote anyone’s survivability, they only exist to have fun with.

Consequently, if you try to back off the game rules so they’ll behave more as a society and less as a game, what you end up with is something that attempts to promote a delusion: it’s not really a society, though we might have some fond memories of treating them as such, it’s a game.

I’m not sure if Myers’ media professor expertise really suits dabbling in matters of social science. However, so far as being a City of Heroes player is concerned, he’s quite correct to point out that the developers have been negligent to promote a good PvP game environment.
Arkazon

I second Scott’s request for response to the quotations. Scott makes a pretty good analysis of the situation, and while there may be some things of interest to be found in the paper, the overall theme is incorrect. It can be difficult to applaud tertiary gems of value in a paper when the greater argument is vastly flawed.
http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

Society only requires a history and a population to be examined as such. That’s all MUDs needed, that’s all MMOs need.

http://www.mud.co.uk/dvw/mudsasasociety.html

(and I wonder if Professor Myers has read this one.)
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

@J
I don’t find an observation of human behaviors within a MUD to be, in itself, definitive proof that an online game can operate as a society.

But that’s probably because the word I’m looking for isn’t “society.” Society is an easy word to satisfy, “a society is an economic, social or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied multitude of individuals.” You could call a neighborhood sewing circle a society.

The word I’m looking for has more to do with being something more concrete than a social structure. Something along the lines of actually having a meaning or purpose to it that necessitates participation within that society.

MMORPGs are tricky because their only purpose is to enjoy. That said, what’s more important: the game that produces the enjoyment, or the social structure that has collected about the game?

When the activity is no longer about the activity, the draw that brought the members together will often vanish, and the members will drift apart. Online world societies are not a very good society along these lines, and the developers of said worlds may come to regret treating their games as though the game was not that important.
Arkazon

Regarding the discussion of societies, I think the term can be used less strictly. In this case, the society is a collective group of individuals coming together for common purposes. That collective group invariably develops typical norms and expectations above and beyond the codified laws of the medium which they are using.

For example, high school can be considered a little society. It has a collection of people, many of whom come and go freely. There are the “base rules” imposed by the medium (the school), but there are also social rules which the members abide by. Breaking those social rules results in penalties inflicted by the societal members. To me, MMOs are no different. The purpose is recreation instead of survival or education, but the resulting social constructs are pretty comparable.
Raad

HOW DARE YOU RETORT TO THE ALL-MIGHTY PROFESSOR? DO YOU WISH FOR HIM TO BRING IT?
Ratman_tf

Today’s password is “Transgressive”
Yes, now we get to watch Prof. Dickhead weasel around about the concequence of his actions. Anybody playing Griefer Bingo? I’ve got 4 squares already!
Nerd Rage

I have to admit, I’m impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone grief the meta-game, nor troll at the academic level. Well done, professor. Well done indeed.
L’Emmerdeur

Proof positive that there is a MASSIVE bubble in the higher education system, and a third of all colleges need to go bankrupt and shut down. This guy is a professor? Really, some things in this world could do without 15-page papers and six-figure tenure slots. FFS, lrn2flipburgers.
L’Emmerdeur

Also: Loyola? Really? Aren’t there more pressing local issues to write about in your field, like the PvP zone formerly known as New Orleans?
Calandryll

So I’ve finished reading the paper and he identifies the three things that got him in hot water with the CoH community. Using teleport foe, disrupting player events, and not grouping. The last of the three seems to be the smallest factor in all of this and is explored the least (as far as I could tell) in the paper, but the first two are interesting. Mostly because as someone who has worked with online gaming communities for a long time, the fact that there was a negative reaction (even a strong one) to what he was doing is not surprising at all.

The first issue, teleport foe. I think Scott already covered this. Twixt was using this power with the assumption (based on his own words) that it had no negative consequences to the characters (and thus the players) of those he did it to. Of course, as Scott pointed out there is a negative consequence and in fact it’s a big one. This lack of understanding of the game rules of the game he was studying unfortunately biases his findings greatly. People weren’t mad so much at the tactic, or that they “lost” the fight, but rather at the *consequences* of the tactic to their character. He was playing and working on this study with the assumption that what he was doing had no negative impact on the players when in fact it did. He was ruining their characters, albeit not in a permanent way, and causing players to advance more slowly in a game that is very much about advancement. That’s a big deal to the players he was doing this to. This is a pretty big flaw that Professor Myers shouldn’t ignore or gloss over.

The second issue (which isn’t being talked about as much) is the bigger one for me. He continuously and purposefully disrupted player run events. When I was on Ultima Online, he’d have gotten a warning for that and then a ban if he continued to actively go out of his way to do that. Player run events are a big part of mmogs for a lot of people. More importantly, they are a big part of what makes mmogs so special, what separates them from single player or non-persistent online games, and what helps grow and foster healthy communities. While he is correct that there is no game mechanic that keeps him from doing what he did and that these are governed by social dynamics, there is no denying that his doing so caused distress within the community. Distress usually leads to anger. Again, this isn’t something that is a shock or should be surprising to anyone who understands online communities nor should it be surprising that people would get very mad about it. Disrupting events is also generally considered a form of griefing, which is against most mmog EULA/TOS. It’s a gray area without question, but that’s the nature of griefing and harassment. They are gray areas more often than not. This isn’t about roleplaying or good vs. evil (both of which have been used as very weak excuses for this kind of behavior by griefers for years), this is about players having fun.

So to answer the question Professor Myers asks in his last update, “Was Twixt’s behavior worthy of wrath?” – Yes it was. Not only was it justified, but it’s also completely predictable by anyone who has been playing mmogs for more than a short time. Now to be clear, while the severity of the reaction was not justified at all, it shouldn’t be surprising either. There is never an excuse or reason to make death threats and the like but it does happen. And the notion that a community will turn on a player who goes out of his way to interrupt others’ game play, hurt their characters, and disrupt events they spent time planning, is completely predictable. And that some players will take it too far is also predictable. I’ve seen it dozens of times. And just to be clear again, taking things out of game with death threats should get the person who did it banned. So again, in no way am I condoning that. But it’s hard to see it as “surprising” when it has happened dozens of times in the past and often for far less than what Twixt was doing.

One of the other issues I have with the paper is there is a heavy implication that the social rules in CoH were somehow unclear or unfair. While that is true at first for anyone new to the community, these kinds of rules can often be made clear pretty quickly. As was the case here. The reality seems to be that the community warned Twixt to knock it off. That he was told many times “hey, we’d prefer you didn’t do this” and then armed fully with the knowledge of what the social rules were, once they were in fact crystal clear, he then chose to ignore them. This wasn’t a case of someone stumbling into a community and not knowing the rules and being ostracized immediately for one single mistake. This wasn’t a case of ambiguous social rules. This was a pattern of someone who knew the social rules, and more importantly, the community knowing that he knew the social rules, and continuously ignoring them. It was only then, after repeatedly and deliberately ignoring the requestd to “play fair” that the community finally had enough and fully turned on him. I’m actually surprised that anyone would be surprised by that either.

The shame of this for me is that the more interesting aspect of all of this is the idea that in a PVP community (which are often categorized as hyper-competitive) players would attempt to create understandings and “house rules” in the name of fair play and simply having fun. It seems that the CoH PVP community as described in the paper was more interested in having fun than “winning at all costs”.

And to me, that is something worth exploring *far* more than what happens when someone goes out of their way to ruin that fun, even when following the game mechanics.
Inspector 6

I’m really enjoying the dead-on critiques of the Prof’s bizarre research, but I should clarify a few things:

“The entire reason Twixt’s opponents were so enraged by his “droning” was that, unlike death to PvP opponents, death to NPCs imposes an XP penalty, which in CoH/V can be fairly punitive. Myers is wrong here on a very key point – not only is there a game-imposed penalty for being droned, it’s one of the most punitive penalties in the game.”

While being defeated by NPC’s did result in an XP penalty, getting teleported in front of the insta-kill drones did not. I suppose the XP penalty (“debt”) did bother some players, but honestly I think people mostly just reacted to Twixt’s completely unreadable motivations. His strange and mechanical chats were baffling if not somewhat insulting, and his repetitious activities did not qualify him for any measurable rewards.

And though he claims in his paper that he “played to win the zone,” he did not play cooperatively, which by far would have been the easiest way to win the zone. He describes how he was essentially forced to play solo due to increasing hostility from other players, but he purposefully chose to make it impossible for anyone to sympathize with him or his objectives.

His paper (and to a larger extent, the article) tells a very subjective version of the Professor’s behavior. Quotes taken from the game’s chat channels are highly selective and barely include his own comments, and he doesn’t measure or even define his in-game objectives.

His research is little more than a biased anecdote laced with claims of grandeur and victimization, and I’m glad that most people who understand MMOs (and in some cases, knew his character personally) can see it for what it is.
http://www.mobhunter.com Moorgard

This is why I try to stay on Lum’s good side. He is just way too adept at writing massive posts full of damning links that make a fella look like a jackass.
Calandryll

That’s good to know about the drones, but he did also teleport people into NPCs which would have resulted in xp debt. But again, for me the larger issue was his distrupting of events.

I think this part is the part that bothered me the most…

“Game rules are prohibitive and paradoxical; social rules – most particularly the ones I observed in CoH — are authoritarian and static, inhibiting game play. With social rules in effect, the CoH game becomes less a game and more a society. There is less play and more politics. The CoH game designers – and other mmo designers — seem to have largely abdicated their responsibility to design a game in favor of providing a sandbox for players to use as they wish. This may be good for game designer jobs, their blog readers, and their pocketbooks, but it is not particularly good for their games.”

This really misses the point and one of the big selling points of mmogs. Badly. These social rules aren’t about inhibiting gameplay. They are about adding to the gameplay. They are about creating NEW ways to play the game. Even in games like CoH which are in no way a “sandbox” game. This is fun for players even for those new to the social rules. These social rules didn’t dominate every aspect of the game and are easily avoidable for those that don’t want them. It just means being a part of the community rather than going out of your way to remove yourself from it.

This isn’t about “abdicating responsibility”, it’s about letting the community decide how they want to have fun. To change how they have fun. That’s a GOOD thing for the developers, the players, and the game.
Drey

*gets bowl of popcorn*
Robin Kestrel

Anyone else getting a “mentally ill/personality disorder” vibe from this guy, or is it just me?
Amaranthar

Calandryll:
“The shame of this for me is that the more interesting aspect of all of this is the idea that in a PVP community (which are often categorized as hyper-competitive) players would attempt to create understandings and “house rules” in the name of fair play and simply having fun. It seems that the CoH PVP community as described in the paper was more interested in having fun than “winning at all costs”.”

Remember that these players largely started out playing together, before the “evil” was released. They were already friends, used to working together. I think that’s a completely different thing than the normal arena of strangers. The only way to replicate this would be to duplicate the circumstances. Even then, if the game were too big, I doubt it would work.

If I’m not mistaken, you may have seen a very similar thing in UO when RPers got together and made their own communities, and had rules for not using the uber armors and weapons. There were also rules such as wearing the death robe after being killed and not being allowed to participate for a time, to allow for a side to win. I know of one player who was dismissed from a guild because he kept killing someone who forgot, or didn’t know, to wear his death robe.

CoH could have alowed the players to handle this themselves by making the PvP zones instanced, and allowing only guilds in.

But to me that’s not a true social game. It’s a game that allows for social activity. In a true social game it wouldn’t rely on instancing the problems into specific social cliques.
UnSub

For the record, I’m pretty sure that the CoH/V devs have said that if you get attacked in a PvP zone despite not wanting to be (e.g. during a player event, during a duel with another player, when just standing around and talking) then it isn’t technically harassment. If you are in a PvP zone, you are open to PvP of any kind.

I don’t have any issue with Myer’s paper or topic of study. It is the kind of material that should recorded and if someone wants to rebut him in an academic context (rather than forum wars) then he is now open to that.
Gx1080

Ha. I thought that RV was in the 40-50 range where debt wasnt as much important, but thats not important.

“If you push the buttons of people in a videogame, they take it as seriously as in real life”. Thats an interesting conclusion. And, yes gathering anedcotal (although biased) evidence that “Internet its serious business” can be a reason for investigation. The personal enjoyment of pushing said buttons its another different thing.

And, another thing was proved: MMO players will take every single advantage to their favor regardless of the consequences for the game. Another example in the same game its the Mission Architect farming.

Finally, theres was PvP, and players of both sides (Twixt and everybody else) smack talked both winning and losing (only difference its the lack of curses in one side). That proves that smack talk its a natural element of PvP no matter what any developer do about it.

See, theres was conclusions that the professor didnt put in his report. Mainly because it makes him look like a dick. Maybe its me, but i found hard to be offended for a natural chain of events in any form of PvP in a game.
http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

This whole exercise bothers me in a number of independent ways.

If it’s research, it’s unethical. Myers, if we take him at his word, specifically set out to be annoying, with ‘test subjects’ who were neither aware they were such, compensated for their time, or gave any consent at all to participate, much less informed consent. This pretty obvious and blatant breach of ethics has already been commented on elsewhere by folks more knowledgeable about academic standards of practice than myself. However, this is pretty minor in the scheme of things, mainly because…

It’s play masquerading as research. It’s extremely obvious that PvPing in Recluse Victory took up a significant part of Myers’ time – it was an avocation, not a study. While there’s nothing wrong with game researchers playing games – in fact one would hope they would – passing what is clearly recreation off as research goes well beyond “researching what you know”. There was nothing that prevented Myers from, say, joining Goonswarm in Eve (who take new players gleefully, engage in PvP constantly, and enjoy ‘breaking social norms’ in precisely the way Myers describes) save that he clearly enjoyed CoH (at least until his TP Foe stunt was nerfed) and sought to make a paper out of it.

It’s ‘research’ that discovered nothing particularly new, credulous newspaper reporters notwithstanding. There is a vast body of work in how people behave online. This said nothing new, and nothing that hasn’t been beaten to death in any given message board thread or blog posting on PvP for that matter.

It justifies antisocial behavior. Regardless of how you feel about anything else, Myers knew he was being irritating – in fact, reading his message board postings, he proudly gloated about it. Coming across self-satisfied jeremiads by successful grieftards is nothing new in running an MMO, but it doesn’t make a particular instance of it less irksome.

It maligns one of the most friendly communities in MMOs. PvP microcommunity aside, City of Heroes is one of the most inclusive and welcoming communities in MMOs – a social aspect which Myers apparently found disturbing, to the point that he complained to his local newspaper about how they had been harassing him to the point of death threats. Yet if you log into any CoH server’s newbie zone, you’ll quickly find a group (because CoH players are fond of making new characters) and the message boards are some of the least drama-filled in the industry.

An odd target for such research – unless, as I noted, he was already there, so to speak, and with an axe to grind.
http://kiasa.org/ Zoso

I think the trying to extrapolate anything from City of Heroes PvP to more general conclusions about MMOs is deeply flawed; like Amaranthar says, most players started off playing together, and the CoH community is indeed inclusive and welcoming. I drivelled on at rather more length in a post ( http://kiasa.org/2009/07/08/if-you-dont-like-their-rules-whose-would-you-use/ ) to try and give a bit more background on why the CoH PvP zones never really took off as (presumably) originally intended.
Wanderer

It takes a professor to figure out that if you’re a jerk, people will dislike you, and some will dislike you very strongly?

As for “the game software didn’t make it impossible to do that, so it must be what the developers wanted players to do”, that’s like saying that it’s expected in a game of chess that you switch the pieces around when your opponent’s back is turned, since they’re not physically locked to the chessboard. Just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done; that’s the principle behind good sportsmanship (archaic concept, I know).

Multi-player online games, like any other sort of multi-player game — team sports, for instance — have both formal rules of the game and social expectations that act as lubricant to make the game enjoyable for all the participants. That is the purpose of a game, you know: for all the players to have fun. As someone said over in the article comments, if you’re the only person having fun, you’re doing it wrong; that’s not what the game was designed to be.

All other factors aside, it’s simple economics on the part of the game company: people who aren’t having fun, whether the reason is that the content is boring, or the mechanics are broken, or other players are spoiling the fun, will stop paying to play the game. One of the toughest challenges devs face is designing a game that is fun most of the time for most people. If only one person is having fun, all the rest are going to quit and find a game where they do have fun, and the game collapses. Therefore, “playing as intended” is playing in a way which does not make the game un-fun for others, because by definition, a multi-player game is intended to be fun for all of the paying customers so that they keep on paying. Griefing goes against that intent.

What it all comes down to is simple: People don’t like jerks, no matter what medium they’re interacting with the jerks in. Good work, Professor Obvious.
Stabs

Another issue is the nature of software and software development.

There are always bugs and grey areas where something is kind of a bug, kind of an unintended feature.

Chess is functionally perfect. No one is going to find a teleport foe like feature in Chess.

Every computer game has got bugs and has got exploitable loopholes that could be considered bugs could be considered simply the least objectionable of a set of poor choices.

Players who actively seek these flaws out to gain a play advantage are the bane of games developers (unless they work for QA or are playing Beta). Generally MMOs have an article in the EULA which says something to the effect of don’t do this sort of abuse and enforcement is possible although haphazard.

For example, leading WoW raid guild Exodus were banned recently for exploiting. They realised before they made the boss attempt it was an exploit but used the technique because they felt what they were doing was comparable to exploits other top guilds had used to get world first kills and had gotten away with.
http://www.exo-guild.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1829

All in all a complete headache for developers who work in a medium where there are always bugs but deal with a public to whom bugs are all too often a way to gain dubious advantage over people playing fair.

So that’s another strike against Professor Myers. He was basically cheating – exploiting an unintended synergy of game features in a way that was, no doubt, forbidden by the EULA.
Plastic Rat

“nor troll at the academic level”

Trolls tend to remain anonymous. Non-anonymous trolls are called idiots.
Plastic Rat

I must say, there are a few interestings thing we can all learn from this paper.

1) That little griefer bunnyhopping naked through your player organized event and spamming everyone? Yeah… you probably thought he was some 15 year old with no social life living in his parents basement right?

Chances are he could just as easily be somebody twice your age with a fairly high level job.

Lesson: Age and social status are no indication of maturity.

2) Just because you’re an academic doesn’t automatically mean you’re intelligent.

3) Just because you profess to study human behavior doesn’t automatically mean you have the foggiest idea how to behave as a human being.

4) You can publish a paper on just about any bullshit today and there will be people who will call it ‘fascinating’.
Calandryll

“If I’m not mistaken, you may have seen a very similar thing in UO when RPers got together and made their own communities, and had rules for not using the uber armors and weapons. There were also rules such as wearing the death robe after being killed and not being allowed to participate for a time, to allow for a side to win. I know of one player who was dismissed from a guild because he kept killing someone who forgot, or didn’t know, to wear his death robe. ”

Actually yes, I was one of the UO players who started one of those RP events. It was called the Divided Lands on Lake Superior. The event lasted about a year and at it’s peak we had about 200 participants all following a set of rules to help balance what at the time was a horribly unbalanced combat system and to create a way to PVP without worrying about getting ganked or losing all of your stuff. Mostly we did it as a roleplaing tool and to make PVP more purposefull.

I think we maybe kicked out about 2 people total from the event (one was for the death robe thing you mentioned and the other was for something else) and in both cases they were given multiple warnings. We started out with maybe 30 or 40 players and it grew over time as more people on the server found out about it. When a non-participant interrupted the event we asked them to stop. The vast majority of them stopped and in many cases joined in. These kinds of events were all over UO. The social rules that Professor Myers seems to disdain made UO more fun for a lot of people. They made the game better.

Unsub, the funny thing about that policy is that was the original policy for UO as well. Until we realized that these player events held far more value to the game as a whole than the individual’s “rights” to distrupt them. I wasn’t saying Meyrs broke CoH’s EULA, I was just pointing out that in many mmogs that kind of behavior is actionalble if a consistent pattern of negative behavior is seen. That said, it’s actually covered in the first rule of the Rules of Conduct for CoH too under not causing diress to other players. Which Myers clearly was intentional and purposefully causing. I’ll say this, based on his own description of what he was doing, I am very surprised that he was never warned and/or banned. Very surprised.
Sweetmeat

dmyers,

Most of the posts in this thread are well thought out and dead on. It might behoove you, just for a few minutes, to try and learn something from it rather than taking the defensive and justifying your asshatery. Everyone understands the tendency to become defensive when your justifications are questioned, it doesn’t make you appear any less the fool for trying to defend what is essentially indefensible.

Calandryll, you rock, I hope to see you post more often.
http://rawasaur.livejournal.com Rawrasaur

Smaller, enclosed communities often try to establish certain rules (both written and unwritten) for the betterment of ‘fun’ for everyone. It works, because it focuses on a goal different from ‘play to win’. My local Magic: the Gathering playgroup is much like that. There are a number of players who have varying access to different sized card pools. Some are old-time players, with large collections. Others are casual players who don’t really buy many cards at all. It would be fairly easy for the old-timers to simply bring in extremely powerful (and expensive) decks that would fairly easily trounce the other players within a turn or two. Most players are discouraged from building decks like this, because it makes the environment less fun. There is an unwritten rule about ‘make your deck as powerful as you can, but not ridiculously so’.

I’m one of the players with more card access (and disposable income). I’ve made a few decks that were pushing the border of ‘too strong’, and I stopped playing those decks for those social reasons. Myers was asked to stop, and he didn’t, so he was essentially excluded from the group and treated as a pariah – a self-inflicted status. If he’d stop being a jerk, they’d welcome him back.

–Rawr
Alex

A PK delights in their victory. A griefer delights in your defeat. One is an awful lot more deserving of wrath than the other.
Wanderer

What Alex said. Equally important, fun for a griefer is a zero-sum game: either he can have fun, or someone else can have fun, but not both.

dmeyers is far from the first griefer to act surprised that the people he abuses don’t like him. He’s just the first to write a paper about it.
http://lost-war.com Mist

All I’ve gotten out of this is that CoH/V is a really, really poor PvP game.
Gx1080

@Zoso
You are absolutely right. COH/V just wasnt designed to handle the side of human nature that PvP makes float around.

Another example of this (that the professor cites) was Fansy, the famous bard. He wasnt hated because he was trying to convert the bad guys in the good guys, he was hated because he kited a bunch of mobs to the other players.

Basically, “fighting for good causes” isnt an excuse for being a douche. Machiavellian “the end justifies the means” methods werent popular with people when the church tried them in the Middle Ages, and they arent popular now.

So yes, you can act like that. Guess what: you arent the first one to discover that acting like that makes you unlikable, neither the first one to be surprised about it. Basically, “social rules” does need to be respected when its proven that they make possible a good, satisfating existance between all the members of said society (High school doesnt do the latter, thats why it suck).

Finally, “The COH/V community its one of the most friendly communities in MMOs”. That may be true, but when your competition its the hardcore PvPers and the spoiled WoW children/fan boys, that isnt too hard.

PS: If you are griefing, you dont give explanations to nobody except for “I did it for the lulz”.
Outlawedprod

>This is precisely why the “meta-game” is sport games like football, for instance, is so closely monitored (salary caps, no taping other team’s practices, etc.) and codified.

I think one could argue that the real meta-game in sports is firecoach.com =p At that point it doesn’t matter how well the coach does on the field or what their players think. The mob or even a vocal minority who hates your guts can really make things go downhill for the coach in terms of their personal freedoms as they are put under an even worse microscope that just the media would.
Zuzax

As a longtime player of CoH/V, I will heartily agree that it is a poor PvP game, but most players purposely ignore the PvP part of the game, and gripe when an Issue improves on it. The 1%-ers who do play have my respect for putting up with it. That said, I can’t imagine Professor Twixt had much success ganking noobs, since anyone PvPing with a low level character most likely has a stable of level 50s to retaliate with.

I do have to say after looking over his body of research that he has one of the better get-paid-to-play-games scams going. He must be tenured.
Gx1080

@Outlawedprod
Closely monitored….BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, that was funny.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

@Scott Jennings
I agree on all five foldfaced points in your last comment there. if there’s any real point in which I support Myers here, it’s that he’s correct that City of Heroes PvP really needs work.

The developers have always been afraid to properly balance their incentives in PvP, sitting on a fence of not wanting to alienate their core PvE focus while simultaneously seeing PvP as being a potential area to expand. They need to stop acting so squeamish and do the job right.

That said, City of Heroes has been largely dead to me ever since the Architect was released. They killed the world focus by enticing half the playerbase to live in the Danger Room, and this has placed a rather formidable nail in the coffin of properly uniting the City of Heroes game world. I might try the game again if they ever get around to letting me play a heroic Mastermind or Stalker, but the Architect largely strikes me as a move to put the game out to pasture. I’m ready for City of Heroes 2… of which Champions Online probably won’t be judging by the X-Box 360 focus to the interface.
yunk

The issue “If I violate the social norms of a community I inhabit, while remaining within the letter of its laws, should I be condemned?” is not so simple.

The fact is that our law is based on Common Law. Some want to throw this link out, but if we do we ignore the thousands of years of evolution of society, and millions of years of evolution of our genetic programming, that provides the basis for Common Law. To say only the letter of the law is important is a dangerous road to go down. Since there are reasons those societal norms developed in the first place. Each has to be analyzed in turn. Throwing them all out is basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And of course everyone has to understand that if enough people violate the societal norms, then society may just decide to codify a law against it. Where fewer transgressions would have been tolerated.
War

My only question would be, if he was truly doing research why did said research stop when his favorite griefing tool was nerfed? Wouldn’t he continue on with his “play the game by the designers’ rules” theory? Since the rules were changed by the designers, he should have embraced those new rules, not quit because the rules no long fit his playstyle.
Ardanna

Scott:
I did read your paper. Care to comment on what I quoted from it?

Me:
No, apparently he wouldn’t. Srsly (too hardcore for vowels I guess).
http://www.seriouslycasual.wordpress.com Centuri

I am so going to apply for a government grant to research if players in a male dominated genre, such as MMORPG, react differently if they believe that I am a real life female. Clearly such a topic is worthy of academic study.

It makes me wonder if he just spent all of his time playing COH/V and then got busted at work by his boss. Not willing to admit that he was screwing around durring working hours he hatched an evil plan…
tannenburg

Hey…you may think this guy may be a jerk with a doctorate, but don’t take him as representative of every PhD out there (L’Emmerdeur, I’m glaring sternly at you over my professorial glasses.) You get a range of people in any profession, no matter what it is.

As to the research, deception is a valid study technique (i.e. telling test subjects that they are being tested on behavior A but in actuality they’re being observed for behavior B) but, as Scott noted, the subjects thereof are aware that they’re part of some sort of scientific research. Ambush “research” like the above is more Borat than Pavlov.

I will say, however, that observations coming from a non-laboratory environment (i.e. your hobby) are a perfectly valid spark to true research. If it were me, however, I would have taken my observations and recast them into a true research proposal, moving them into a controlled environment and involving other researchers and staff. Heck, you might even be able to get a gaming company on board with sociological research into gaming habits – if nothing else, they could use the data to tailor their product for market share or to maximize behaviors the designers want to reinforce.

Mind you, I’m not particularly qualified to delve much deeper into this mess. The study of History involves very few live research subjects.
Goedel

Someone should go find out if this was actually approved by an Institutional Review Board.
Sullee

What gets me most is the blame of this one person when all current MMOs are teaming with similar griefers. Oh I get that you are calling him out on trying to rationalize it with some crap about an academic purpose and that’s all well and good.

Again though the basic issue here needs to remain that the games you folks create are not moderated, safe, or even appropriate places for children. Nor does the language, idiocy, and griefing particularly add to the appeal for adults. It’s gotten way worse over the years and MMOs were never a bastion of good behavior anyway (for a lot of reasons).

So, unless you folks clean up your own mess outsiders will through either legislation, negative publicity, or both. I’d think you’d be smart enough to to do it the relatively cheap way and handle it yourselves.
http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com Melf_Himself

Please see this wonderful coverage of the topic by David Sirlin:

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/7/7/dr-house-and-the-professor-who-played-to-win.html

Hate the game, not the player.
Wanderer

…the games you folks create are not moderated, safe, or even appropriate places for children…

And a game advertised as “Teen” or “Mature” needs to be a safe and appropriate place for children because…?
Vetarnias

@Ardanna

What is also interesting is that “dmyers” may or may not be a regular reader of this site, if you consider that he posted here before.

See: http://brokentoys.org/2008/06/23/well-thats-certainly-one-solution/

(I should remember; my wall of text on that page, partly in response to his post, was my first comment here. A year ago already.)

Broken Toys

Random Comments About Gaming And Tractors

Transgressive Behavior

Share this: