Broken Toys Random Comments About Games and Tractors

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

*gets bowl of popcorn*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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

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

>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.

@Outlawedprod
Closely monitored….BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, that was funny.

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.

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).

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.

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.

…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…?

@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.

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?

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.

@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.