5 ms·

I'm with the professor on this one. If you can't play-act like a villain, or a villainous hero, in a game about heroes and villains, then what the hell is the f

by madair 17y ago

I'm with the professor on this one. If you can't play-act like a villain, or a villainous hero, in a game about heroes and villains, then what the hell is the fantasy world of gaming giving other than all the worst weaknesses and faults of the real world? Have any of the detractors stopped to think that perhaps their sense of community and socializing isn't what all gamers want? Societies values are not always intrinsically good. The fantasy world of gaming gives a person the chance to transcend normal forces and values, within the rules of the given fantasy world. It is entirely fitting that this experiment was done in a world of heroes and villains. The majority want to claim a moral prerogative to insist on status quo, just like in the real world, when far fewer of the foundational reasons for the status quo exist. Your real world nor fantasy world freedoms, life, limb, rights are not affected by a rule-abiding player who entered a fantasy world to play out their fantasy of heroes and villains. The genuine and rule-abiding fantasy players rights are impinged by the majority rule. A summary of wrongs here, (1) death threats conducted in the real world against a player who played the intended fantasy in the fantasy world (2) support by the majority of enforcing real world rules as if they had the same weight and imperative in the game world which was being used by design (3) Editorializing in the title of this post, and not least (4) a direct accusation of dishonesty which constitutes a personal attack in the title of this post. If we transcend mob rule and the establishment for a moment, step into the realm of ethics and what is truth, necessary and unnecessary social norms and rules versus individual rights, we find a sad sad tale of the majority wanting to forcing their way on every individual in an mis-balanced sense of societies rights and needs. Kill my karma, if you must, establishment supporters, but it's the professor, not the establishment, who has my support.

xenophanes 17y ago
I don't think you understood the situation. It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates -- who literally couldn't attack/fight his character -- using glitches/bugs. He just wasn't roleplaying a villain. Normally when a villain tries to kill you, you can at least fight him. He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled".
- madair 17y ago
  I read that whole thing, and I'll re-read it, but I really didn't hear at all that he was using glitches and bugs. In fact, the rules and rule-abiding were an important component of the study. Other users were using an area designed for free combat as a social zone. Perhaps the designers should have created a safe social zone, if that was such a popular thing to have.
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    > Rather than fighting other players directly, he used a special ability to teleport them in front of a computer-controlled firing squad, which would immediately kill them. He's doing that because he can't attack them. And they can't attack him either. it says: > the victim has no chance to retaliate They mean literally. If he was just attacking people who could attack him, in a zone where PvP is enabled, it wouldn't be called griefing. Also someone in comments below says they have patched this stuff now. Legitimate behaviors don't get patched.
    - batasrki 17y ago
      Actually, he was killing villains, not heroes. He was on the heroes team, therefore technically he was not killing his teammates. Having said that, however, he did not engage villains in combat, but rather teleport them to a kill zone. That's unethical, for sure. Had he simply engaged villains, I'd see nothing wrong with that. If other players don't want to kill villains, even if that's their job as heroes, that's their problem.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
- ATB 17y ago
  From reading the earlier articles, I believe the player in question was -- * Going to PvP-specific areas only (i.e. areas where 'hero' player characters are meant to fight 'villain' player characters) * Using 'in-character' communication to indicate he wanted to fight villains, like heroes in that area supposedly do. His character was a hero. * Using a teleport power to move some nearby villain player characters near non-player-characters, who would then kill the villains. * Subsequently using 'in-character' communication to cheer about having killed villains. * This was a major issue because many, many players in those player-vs-player (hero vs villain) areas instead would use the areas for 'farming,' i.e. trying to get experience points (or in-character currency) by killing non-player-characters instead. * The 'written vs. unwritten rules' that he broke were specifically the customs of what players were actually doing in those areas (farming) vs what the game designers had intended them to do (kill each other). That conflict between the intended purpose of a game's aspects and how others reacted to it being used that way is the main focus of that professor's article. He seemed to expect for people to suspend their disbelief and remain fully in-character, i.e. following the game's ostensible in-character limitations.
msc 17y ago
The way I see it, he was clearly exploiting game mechanics to grief other players. He was using a specific ability, one that teleports players, to teleport them in front of what appears to be an unkillable robot that instantly kills everything. After he was done with that, he "innocently" taunts them. I'm pretty shocked that NCSoft didn't do anything about this. In other MMOs, that person would've been banned a long, long time ago. I played CoH for a bit, and I think it's still one of the nicest, casual MMO communities around, hell, one of the nicest, casual gaming communities around. This guy walked around a virtual community, disrupting it on purpose just for an experiment. Imagine coming home after a pretty long day of college/work, log on to play, only to have someone permanently teleport you to death, and then taunt you.
- madair 17y ago
  It certainly seems like they had every opportunity to ban him, but chose not to, which implies that it's not quite as simple as the griefer explanation.
  - msc 17y ago
    But they did fix the loophole, which means they weren't supporting what he was doing, and didn't want other people to do it. I'm not familiar with their banning policy, but like I said, trying any cute tricks like that in other MMO communities can certainly get you banned.
mquander 17y ago
You can rationalize his behavior however you like, but it's not socially acceptable to purposefully ruin people's time in a game designed to be fun. The majority is clearly right to enforce their rules in this instance, since playing by the professor's rules ("anything goes") would make the game not at all fun.
- wjy 17y ago
  I'm not familiar with City of Heroes. According to the article, all the action took place in an area where heroes and villains are supposed to be dueling each other, but the social norm was to not do that. If that really is the case, why get mad at a guy who's fighting villains in an area that's all about heroes and villains fighting? Or was that aspect misrepresented in the article? I don't have an opinion; I'm asking questions because I don't have any direct experience in the game.
- batasrki 17y ago
  No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules. The majority can abide by the rules or they can leave. Voting with your wallet is the most powerful way of voting, after all. If the rules in PvP area specify PvP battles and someone wants to battle that way, that's what they're allowed to do. If he did something illegal, it's up to the game designers to correct that. If he did something unethical, like teleporting a villain to a kill zone, he may be disliked. At no point, though, should he be threatened with bodily harm or being bullied by the "majority". If they had ignored him and/or engaged him in battle, he'd have no data for his study.
  - mquander 17y ago
    > "No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules." Is that an edict handed down from on high? The majority has the power to enforce rules (they can impose social consequences on rule-breakers) and they usually have a good deal of wisdom about what rules are worth enforcing. They clearly do enforce them, and who says they shouldn't?
    - batasrki 17y ago
alex_c 17y ago
Just out of curiosity - have you ever played any MMORPGs?
- madair 17y ago
  Yes, mostly FFXI
lutorm 17y ago
It's not up to you to decide how people should enjoy a game, is it? If the majority of the players feel that someone's behavior is impacting their enjoyment then arguably you are in the wrong, as after all, people sign on to the game to have fun, and being killed without defense is probably not fun to most people. So, whether it was explicitly allowed by some written rules somewhere, arguably his behavior was counterproductive to the aims of the customers and I'm surprised the company let him get away with it as long as he did. In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."
- madair 17y ago
  They signed up to play heroes vs villains. That's what they got. They wanted to farm experience points and socialize, but it was harder than they wanted it to be because someone else was following the rules and using their own skills to defeat them. The rules of the game, in this case, are essentially the bill of rights, protecting the minority from the majority. The majority appealed and got some changes to the rules, but the fundamentals mostly stayed the same, and individual players can continue playing as the professor did, if they wish, regardless of the desire of other players to conduct boring activities like build up points by killing NPCs. Perhaps the people who want to do this safely should petition the developer for some NPC-killing only zone. Oh, but then the game would really be ruined. LOL, there's got to be some danger to simply building up points in a game like this. I really wish more people would question the damage being done by this type of common but fantasy-killing majority behavior to the original intent and storyline in MMO games.
- carbon8 17y ago
  If you play a PvP game and/or go into a PvP zone, expect PvP. If you keep getting beat by someone who is playing by the rules, then get better. If there's still no way for you to beat them, then it's on the game developers to balance the game. It's that simple.
lhorie 17y ago
I'm not with either side. One key thing about MMOs is that people are an integral part of the system. We can't just disregard them and pretend that only the rules written in source code are valid, especially when the ultimate goal is to provide a social entertainment environment. I generally consider any form of disruption bad since it's just plain bad manners. But with that being said, I don't think that mob rules are good for a community either. I was a member of a game forum a while back that had interesting off-topic sections (art, news, etc), but the forum would often become a dramafest and focus solely on, say, in-forum "punishment" for in-game cheaters, effectively making all the interesting sections dry up. I have this (rather informal) theory that rules of majority are usually driven by the xkcd.org/386 effect, i.e. in the collective mind, the members are defending a good cause (whether it really is a good cause or not is another story). One could argue that maybe the lone rebel is right, but if the definitions of "right" are subjective to begin with, then does it make sense to take sides?
- madair 17y ago
  Definitions of right are not subjective. That's moral relativism. It's just hard to find what right, but the majority isn't necessarily right.
  - lhorie 17y ago
    Sure, if you're talking about equations. In social contexts, however, being "right" doesn't usually translate to mathematical proofs. You get what I meant.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    It is moral relativism, but what of it? Unless you take it on blind faith there's no real appeal to moral absolutism, either.
gchpaco 17y ago
Having played City of Heroes and knowing what's going on here, you're completely off base. The CoH PvP zones have special drones protecting the base, to give people breathing room. This professor was repeatedly teleporting people into them, an act which gave him no reward whatsoever and which (at least for a while) penalized the person involved (drone kills would give you XP debt). Neither of these properties hold during normal, legitimate, PvP play. RPing a villain is fine. Acting like an asshole makes you a pariah. Surprised?
- batasrki 17y ago
  Thank you for completely clarifying the situation. This is what I was talking about. He didn't battle the villains outright and beating them, what he was doing WAS unethical. This makes me wonder why the game admins did not step in and stop him from antagonizing the community like this. It wasn't normal play behaviour. It doesn't excuse the threatening, but at least puts it into proper context.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- timwiseman 17y ago
  I do not play City of Heroes, however if you read his research paper and his comments, he did those things to remove those players as obstacles in order to complete the objective of the zone (capturing 6 towers as I understand). Since I do not play please let me know if I misunderstand, but it sounds like he was taking a perfectly legitimate avenue to his ultimate goal of capturing those 6 towers and winning the zone.
  - gchpaco 17y ago
    The towers are, by design, nowhere close to any of the key positions. No one close enough to be teleported into the towers (the power has a range limit) is in any way threatening the nominal goals of the zone. I'm not sure why they didn't ban him, honestly. I had gathered that this type of sociopathy was considered griefing by the developers and grounds for temporary or permanent bans.
dasil003 17y ago
Is it illegal to walk down the street with super soaker spraying everyone who walks by? Probably not technically, but you can bet people would be pissed, you might get beaten up, and likely a cop would attempt to cite you with something. Is the fact that people don't like to get squirted with water part of the tyranny of the majority? You can philosophize all you want about bigger issues. Lord knows thousands of 4chan'ers are willing to expound upon the rights of trolls ad nauseam. However the simple fact that you're ignoring is this guy went into a game with the express goal of pissing people off, and acted surprised and fascinated by this reaction. I don't give 2 craps about online games, or about whether he has "the right" to do it (of course he has the right to be an asshole just as people in the real world do), the bottom line this guy is a hack--this research is utterly pointless and obvious.
- HalcyonMuse 17y ago
  Never mind that the side walk is not designated as a place to spray people with super soakers? This analogy is flawed. However, that doesn't undermine your later argument as far as I can tell.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    The PvP area is not designated as a place to use a flaw in the game design to insta-kill people.

by madair 17y ago

xenophanes 17y ago

I don't think you understood the situation. It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates -- who literally couldn't attack/fight his character -- using glitches/bugs. He just wasn't roleplaying a villain. Normally when a villain tries to kill you, you can at least fight him. He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled".

madair 17y ago
I read that whole thing, and I'll re-read it, but I really didn't hear at all that he was using glitches and bugs. In fact, the rules and rule-abiding were an important component of the study. Other users were using an area designed for free combat as a social zone. Perhaps the designers should have created a safe social zone, if that was such a popular thing to have.
- xenophanes 17y ago
  > Rather than fighting other players directly, he used a special ability to teleport them in front of a computer-controlled firing squad, which would immediately kill them. He's doing that because he can't attack them. And they can't attack him either. it says: > the victim has no chance to retaliate They mean literally. If he was just attacking people who could attack him, in a zone where PvP is enabled, it wouldn't be called griefing. Also someone in comments below says they have patched this stuff now. Legitimate behaviors don't get patched.
  - batasrki 17y ago
    Actually, he was killing villains, not heroes. He was on the heroes team, therefore technically he was not killing his teammates. Having said that, however, he did not engage villains in combat, but rather teleport them to a kill zone. That's unethical, for sure. Had he simply engaged villains, I'd see nothing wrong with that. If other players don't want to kill villains, even if that's their job as heroes, that's their problem.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
ATB 17y ago
From reading the earlier articles, I believe the player in question was -- * Going to PvP-specific areas only (i.e. areas where 'hero' player characters are meant to fight 'villain' player characters) * Using 'in-character' communication to indicate he wanted to fight villains, like heroes in that area supposedly do. His character was a hero. * Using a teleport power to move some nearby villain player characters near non-player-characters, who would then kill the villains. * Subsequently using 'in-character' communication to cheer about having killed villains. * This was a major issue because many, many players in those player-vs-player (hero vs villain) areas instead would use the areas for 'farming,' i.e. trying to get experience points (or in-character currency) by killing non-player-characters instead. * The 'written vs. unwritten rules' that he broke were specifically the customs of what players were actually doing in those areas (farming) vs what the game designers had intended them to do (kill each other). That conflict between the intended purpose of a game's aspects and how others reacted to it being used that way is the main focus of that professor's article. He seemed to expect for people to suspend their disbelief and remain fully in-character, i.e. following the game's ostensible in-character limitations.

msc 17y ago

The way I see it, he was clearly exploiting game mechanics to grief other players. He was using a specific ability, one that teleports players, to teleport them in front of what appears to be an unkillable robot that instantly kills everything. After he was done with that, he "innocently" taunts them. I'm pretty shocked that NCSoft didn't do anything about this. In other MMOs, that person would've been banned a long, long time ago. I played CoH for a bit, and I think it's still one of the nicest, casual MMO communities around, hell, one of the nicest, casual gaming communities around. This guy walked around a virtual community, disrupting it on purpose just for an experiment. Imagine coming home after a pretty long day of college/work, log on to play, only to have someone permanently teleport you to death, and then taunt you.

madair 17y ago
It certainly seems like they had every opportunity to ban him, but chose not to, which implies that it's not quite as simple as the griefer explanation.
- msc 17y ago
  But they did fix the loophole, which means they weren't supporting what he was doing, and didn't want other people to do it. I'm not familiar with their banning policy, but like I said, trying any cute tricks like that in other MMO communities can certainly get you banned.

mquander 17y ago

You can rationalize his behavior however you like, but it's not socially acceptable to purposefully ruin people's time in a game designed to be fun. The majority is clearly right to enforce their rules in this instance, since playing by the professor's rules ("anything goes") would make the game not at all fun.

wjy 17y ago
I'm not familiar with City of Heroes. According to the article, all the action took place in an area where heroes and villains are supposed to be dueling each other, but the social norm was to not do that. If that really is the case, why get mad at a guy who's fighting villains in an area that's all about heroes and villains fighting? Or was that aspect misrepresented in the article? I don't have an opinion; I'm asking questions because I don't have any direct experience in the game.
batasrki 17y ago
No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules. The majority can abide by the rules or they can leave. Voting with your wallet is the most powerful way of voting, after all. If the rules in PvP area specify PvP battles and someone wants to battle that way, that's what they're allowed to do. If he did something illegal, it's up to the game designers to correct that. If he did something unethical, like teleporting a villain to a kill zone, he may be disliked. At no point, though, should he be threatened with bodily harm or being bullied by the "majority". If they had ignored him and/or engaged him in battle, he'd have no data for his study.
- mquander 17y ago
  > "No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules." Is that an edict handed down from on high? The majority has the power to enforce rules (they can impose social consequences on rule-breakers) and they usually have a good deal of wisdom about what rules are worth enforcing. They clearly do enforce them, and who says they shouldn't?
  - batasrki 17y ago

alex_c 17y ago

Just out of curiosity - have you ever played any MMORPGs?

madair 17y ago
Yes, mostly FFXI

lutorm 17y ago

It's not up to you to decide how people should enjoy a game, is it? If the majority of the players feel that someone's behavior is impacting their enjoyment then arguably you are in the wrong, as after all, people sign on to the game to have fun, and being killed without defense is probably not fun to most people. So, whether it was explicitly allowed by some written rules somewhere, arguably his behavior was counterproductive to the aims of the customers and I'm surprised the company let him get away with it as long as he did. In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."

madair 17y ago
They signed up to play heroes vs villains. That's what they got. They wanted to farm experience points and socialize, but it was harder than they wanted it to be because someone else was following the rules and using their own skills to defeat them. The rules of the game, in this case, are essentially the bill of rights, protecting the minority from the majority. The majority appealed and got some changes to the rules, but the fundamentals mostly stayed the same, and individual players can continue playing as the professor did, if they wish, regardless of the desire of other players to conduct boring activities like build up points by killing NPCs. Perhaps the people who want to do this safely should petition the developer for some NPC-killing only zone. Oh, but then the game would really be ruined. LOL, there's got to be some danger to simply building up points in a game like this. I really wish more people would question the damage being done by this type of common but fantasy-killing majority behavior to the original intent and storyline in MMO games.
carbon8 17y ago
If you play a PvP game and/or go into a PvP zone, expect PvP. If you keep getting beat by someone who is playing by the rules, then get better. If there's still no way for you to beat them, then it's on the game developers to balance the game. It's that simple.

lhorie 17y ago

I'm not with either side. One key thing about MMOs is that people are an integral part of the system. We can't just disregard them and pretend that only the rules written in source code are valid, especially when the ultimate goal is to provide a social entertainment environment. I generally consider any form of disruption bad since it's just plain bad manners. But with that being said, I don't think that mob rules are good for a community either. I was a member of a game forum a while back that had interesting off-topic sections (art, news, etc), but the forum would often become a dramafest and focus solely on, say, in-forum "punishment" for in-game cheaters, effectively making all the interesting sections dry up. I have this (rather informal) theory that rules of majority are usually driven by the xkcd.org/386 effect, i.e. in the collective mind, the members are defending a good cause (whether it really is a good cause or not is another story). One could argue that maybe the lone rebel is right, but if the definitions of "right" are subjective to begin with, then does it make sense to take sides?

madair 17y ago
Definitions of right are not subjective. That's moral relativism. It's just hard to find what right, but the majority isn't necessarily right.
- lhorie 17y ago
  Sure, if you're talking about equations. In social contexts, however, being "right" doesn't usually translate to mathematical proofs. You get what I meant.
- philwelch 17y ago
  It is moral relativism, but what of it? Unless you take it on blind faith there's no real appeal to moral absolutism, either.

gchpaco 17y ago

Having played City of Heroes and knowing what's going on here, you're completely off base. The CoH PvP zones have special drones protecting the base, to give people breathing room. This professor was repeatedly teleporting people into them, an act which gave him no reward whatsoever and which (at least for a while) penalized the person involved (drone kills would give you XP debt). Neither of these properties hold during normal, legitimate, PvP play. RPing a villain is fine. Acting like an asshole makes you a pariah. Surprised?

batasrki 17y ago
Thank you for completely clarifying the situation. This is what I was talking about. He didn't battle the villains outright and beating them, what he was doing WAS unethical. This makes me wonder why the game admins did not step in and stop him from antagonizing the community like this. It wasn't normal play behaviour. It doesn't excuse the threatening, but at least puts it into proper context.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
timwiseman 17y ago
I do not play City of Heroes, however if you read his research paper and his comments, he did those things to remove those players as obstacles in order to complete the objective of the zone (capturing 6 towers as I understand). Since I do not play please let me know if I misunderstand, but it sounds like he was taking a perfectly legitimate avenue to his ultimate goal of capturing those 6 towers and winning the zone.
- gchpaco 17y ago
  The towers are, by design, nowhere close to any of the key positions. No one close enough to be teleported into the towers (the power has a range limit) is in any way threatening the nominal goals of the zone. I'm not sure why they didn't ban him, honestly. I had gathered that this type of sociopathy was considered griefing by the developers and grounds for temporary or permanent bans.

dasil003 17y ago

Is it illegal to walk down the street with super soaker spraying everyone who walks by? Probably not technically, but you can bet people would be pissed, you might get beaten up, and likely a cop would attempt to cite you with something. Is the fact that people don't like to get squirted with water part of the tyranny of the majority? You can philosophize all you want about bigger issues. Lord knows thousands of 4chan'ers are willing to expound upon the rights of trolls ad nauseam. However the simple fact that you're ignoring is this guy went into a game with the express goal of pissing people off, and acted surprised and fascinated by this reaction. I don't give 2 craps about online games, or about whether he has "the right" to do it (of course he has the right to be an asshole just as people in the real world do), the bottom line this guy is a hack--this research is utterly pointless and obvious.

HalcyonMuse 17y ago
Never mind that the side walk is not designated as a place to spray people with super soakers? This analogy is flawed. However, that doesn't undermine your later argument as far as I can tell.
- dasil003 17y ago
  The PvP area is not designated as a place to use a flaw in the game design to insta-kill people.