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, adjusting2.
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 Radbot3. 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.)
#1 by Sullee on July 10th, 2009
@Wanderer
“And a game advertised as “Teen” or “Mature” needs to be a safe and appropriate place for children because…?”
Because the mandate to create responsibly does not end with the ESRB rating.
I’m not talking about censorship of art I am talking about enforcing the very rules for behavior these games already have. I’m talking about having some real human mod\gm\referee investigate complaints about perpetual griefers and hand out severe punishments. I’m talking about MMO companies sharing a ‘banned customer’ list such that being a known douchebag might not just get you in trouble in the current game you are playing but in all of them.
Currently MMO companies turn a blind eye to practically everything but blatant sexual harassment or racism. Now the arguement here is likely to be that a rule wasn’t broken.. that this was legal play. But that’s a crock of shit and we all know it. As I said before griefing is not a minor offense in real life. I gave the example of cutting someone off in traffic and then laughing at them so they know you did it on purpose. Do that everyday even to different people and you likely will be involved in legal action, could be the victim of violence, lose your job, or even your life. My point is griefing doesn’t fly in rl.. it isn’t tolerated.. ever.
The lessons our games should be teaching with respect to competition is fair play and sportsmanship. Not how to be a trash talking asshole hiding behind internet anonymity. Sadly we’ve allowed too much trash talking to pervade all of sports. What at one time was limited to showmanship and hype (e.g. pro wrestling or boxing pre-match) is now everywhere.
In some sense I think this person is an idiot for going public. Did they not take those death threats seriously? Do they not understand the level of hatred griefing evokes? I used the cutting off in traffic analogy because I think the road rage response is analogous.. it isn’t rational. I don’t doubt for a second there are people who wanted to cause him actual harm.
#2 by Amaranthar on July 10th, 2009
Sullee, I don’t like to disagree with you because you are a sensible person and usually right. But I don’t think you are with this last one, and I think it’s important for social gaming to recognize something here.
People do grief other people in RL, all the time. Not everyone, not most people, but something similar to what we see in MMOs on a percentage basis. And really, you kind of pointed it out with your road rage analogy. It does happen.
The thing is, when it happens in RL most people shrug it off with a groan. Jerks on the highway following you up the ass end of your gas tank at 65 miles an hour, trying to steal your girl, your job or position, backstabbing an idea of yours, etc., are all fairly common. Robbing stores, bar fights, embezzlement, are more serious forms of RL griefing.
What’s important is that people learn to deal with it in RL. They don’t like it, of course, but just deal with it and move on. It’s an important part of life lessons we learn as we grow up. And in any social gaming, it’s going to be there too. As we can see. But the response is all wrong. Players want it removed, and producers and developers want to remove it. Game play options are taken out or made wildly unrealistic to try to remove the griefing. And in the end, you have a shell of a social environment. Nothing more than a message board on artistic steroids, the goal, whether people recognize it or not, has been to create exactly that with multiplayer game rooms added for fun.
The end result is kindergarten. Direction and control, and if someone doesn’t cooperate, give them a time out. If kindergarten is the result, MMOs are doing players a huge disservice. And if you look around, you can see that players are noticing. Most of them can’t put their finger on it, but likewise most of them are unhappy. Look at all the gamers who are looking for the “next best thing”. The “next gen” of MMOs. Look at all of them who leave WoW for new games, and then go back when they find in that new game “more of the same”. Yet, the promise of massive social interaction is so strong (it’s in our deepest nature), that most still look, still play the best available option to them.
No, these are not “just games”. Something that Dave Myers missed, it seems to me.
#3 by Axecleaver on July 10th, 2009
All microsocieties and social groups have a set of rules and social norms that the group encourages, with carrot and stick. This is as true of a street gang as it is of a stamp collecting club, or even – yes – players in MMO’s. To rail against the “appropriateness” of these rules is entirely missing the sociological point. You don’t get to set the rules. It would be just as silly to complain that smoking on an elevator gets you ostracized.
Your job as a member of the social group is to discover and understand the rules, not to debate their value. If you want to break them, go ahead – but you will get the stick.
Honestly, this is something I’d expect to see in a two page Sociology 101 paper. Perhaps you should run this by some of your colleagues. Was it peer reviewed?
#4 by Xevious on July 10th, 2009
Amaranthar, if people grief in RL, there is often consequences. Yes, in some of those examples, people simply move on after being griefed, and it is important for people to be able to deal with being griefed or harassed, but Sullee’s point is that repeated griefing will lead to RL consequences that have no equivalent in MMOs.
If I walk into a public area and start yelling insults at people and making obscene comments, I will eventually get arrested. I keep doing it and I will probably end up spending time in jail and getting fined over and over. Yet you look at WoW’s chat channels and you can find some pretty vile stuff, but Blizzard doesn’t seem to care. They just want your money. This is what Sullee is talking about. Heck, all they need to do is slap a ‘gameplay may change with online play’ or something like that on the box and they don’t have to take any responsibility. Nice deal.
People want societies and communities to form, but without any real way for them to police themselves; you will always end up with jerks causing chaos. If you can’t give the tools to the players, then the developers need to do it. Without it, you will always have the jerks running the show, unless your community manages to stay small enough.
Of course, I am guilty in this also. I continue to play WoW with my wife and kids. I am telling Blizzard that I am ok with the fact that they don’t enforce their own rules consistently and avoid responsibility for what happens in their own game. I guess I have just accepted that this is how it is, and deal with it. But I am one of those people who are looking for the ‘next best thing’ and part of it is that I am sick of online games being full of jerks.
#5 by Vetarnias on July 10th, 2009
Hmm, the more I think about this situation, the more I’m curious what the good professor would think of all the scamming taking place in EVE — where it’s actually encouraged. Perhaps it would yield a much better study than trying to annoy people in City of Heroes (which I never played).
And he should do it from a disinterested perspective, his current study having been invalidated from the moment he chose to be a participant rather than an observer, and worse than that, to be a participant seemingly less for the specific purpose of stimulating a response than because he enjoyed being one.
#6 by Ex-Seer Janus on July 10th, 2009
While I agree with the general thrust of the post, Scott, I want to observe two things:
1) XP debt in CoX is utterly trivial. Especially with the Architect system, and rested XP bonuses — there’s a cap on debt, and it is low, and an eight-man team can easily burn it off in a single mission. And you still gain influence ($$, effectively), even while in debt.
2) While I’m not 100% informed about where Twixt hunted, if it was largely limited to RV, as you seemed to indicate, RV is level limited, and you can’t even enter until level 40, which by then debt really means even less because you’re moving from “uber character” to “really double super uber”.
Further, there are no “player events” in RV in the UO sense — the only kind of PE you’ll have is a group of non-PvPers massing to get a few kill-AV Badges (that probably take two teams of 8 to do smoothly). While, yes, the design of this is to feed sheep into the woodchipper on the part of the devs, there’s really only a tiny fraction of the playerbase that’s Badge-whorish enough to care to do that “content”
(I say this as a Badge whore myself, whose Badger still doesn’t have 4 of the 6 possible because RV raids are a really really rare occurrence on the server I play on) (even after five years of playing, sheesh)
But, really, on the scale of “PK Guild raiding an UO player town based event”, this really rates a “2″ at absolute complete most. It is a dick move to not let the sheep-ish badgers get their RV AV Badges, but it sadly is 100% legal, even by Eula, by Dev design.
(The design problem is that, as I said, it realistically takes at least 2 8-man groups to “raid” RV and spawn the AVs for the Badge, but if you’re not in an active Super-Group, you have to call on open channels, and that INVARIABLY draws some wolves. If you don’t have to call, then you probably will have zero PvP opposition because PvP in CoX is largely not fun and there’s not a high population of people naturally fighting one another in RV)
Again, don’t disagree with the specific pointsor overall message, but I think you overplayed the Actual-Impact as it relates to CoX.
-B
#7 by Wanderer on July 11th, 2009
@Sullee
Because the mandate to create responsibly does not end with the ESRB rating.
Do I correctly understand you, then, as saying that everything — no matter how it is labeled or marketed — must be appropriate for children, and that it is not “creating responsively” to produce something not intended for children?
Do I further understand you that the only responsibility involved is that of the creator, and that the parents bear no responsibility to select appropriate material for their children?
If so, I totally disagree with you on both aspects.
The world does not consist exclusively of children, nor does it revolve around children (especially your children). There are some things in the world that are for children, and some things that are not. In the case of computer games, there are convenient little labels on the boxes that tell you which of those things you are looking at. Saying “but I want to let my kids play WoW, even though the rating says they’re too young” is on a par with “but I want to play Shadowbane, I just don’t want other players to kill me.” That’s not how it works. If you play a PvP game, you can expect to get PK’d. If you play a microtransaction game, you can expect to shell out $$$. If you play a T-rated game, you can expect to see people acting like teenagers. If you don’t like those aspects of the game, then don’t play a PvP game, don’t play a microtransaction game, and stick to Toontown or the Hello Kitty MMO. There are games for everyone, and nobody has a right to demand that games be changed from who they’re for into games customized for themselves.
In the case of WoW, the game provides multiple options to keep your innocent little children from seeing naughty words. You can leave the language filter on. You can leave the trade and general channels. You can make heavy use of the Ignore feature. You can join a guild geared towards families with pre-teen children (yes, they exist). You have options. The fact that you choose not to exercise those options is not the fault of the game designers. And, of course, one of those options is to not allow your children to play a game which is clearly labeled on the box as not being appropriate for their age.
None of those options, though, are to demand that the entire world, and games in particular, be made over into what you think is “safe and appropriate” to children.
Who decides? Would you let Jack Thompson decide what is appropriate? Or Jack Chick?
You see, in a system where everything is required to be safe and appropriate for children, you aren’t the one who gets to decide what is and what is not appropriate. Someone else does. Maybe it’s someone who thinks that war is bad, and prohibits all PvP. Maybe it’s someone who thinks that violence is bad, period, and prohibits all combat. Maybe it’s someone who thinks cliques are bad, so guilds have to go. Maybe it’s someone who’s a Christian extremist, so magic can’t be allowed. Maybe it’s someone who’s a Muslim extremist, so all female characters must wear burqas. You see where this is going? When you demand that someone make the rules, there’s no guarantee they’re going to agree with your rules.
The only way you can have any hope of a game that matches what you want for your children is for there to be a wide variety of games, where you can pick the option that matches their preferences. True, that requires a certain amount of effort on the part of parents, rather than just offloading their responsibility on the world at large, but parental responsibility has served civilization well for thousands of years; changing it seems like a bad idea. If you don’t think a specific game is appropriate to your children, don’t let them play it.
No, it isn’t irresponsible for a game company to create a game for teens or adults, any more than it’s irresponsible for a car company to build cars, even though little children can’t drive. It’s irresponsible for a parent to allow their children to play a game that is not intended to be nor marketed as “safe and appropriate” for children, and then complain that they got what they paid for.
#8 by name withheld... on July 15th, 2009
As a grad student studying videogame players I have to say that if I attempted to do what he did I would never get my dissertation approved and I would be lucky not to have severe consequences. He didn’t get human subjects approval and didn’t tell the people he interacted with that they would be included in his study. His blog posts and comments seem very unprofessional. I guess once you have tenure you don’t have to be on good behavior.