

Professor Studies Social Customs in Video Games - Becomes Most Hated Player - TallGuyShort
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html

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

Wait wait - so he knowingly violated all social norms, despite gentle attempts
to correct him, and that proves there is an ugly side to fantasyland? It would
have been more interesting if he had done something non-mainstream that did
not impact on other players and seen if it would have gotten any abuse.

After all this is the essence of tolerance in real life - nobody expects you
to be tolerant towards people who are shooting you; tolerance comes from a
"live and let live" approach. Investigating the equivalent of that online
would have been interesting, but it is not what he did here.

What he did here was the equivalent of say, farting in your face because it is
"within the rules" (i.e. not illegal) and then act surprised when this made
him socially excluded.

~~~
adimit
I think the point of the article was not that he earned a bad reputation for
griefing - it was more that people reverted to a rather medieval behaviour
when confronted with such a situation. Earning a bad reputation and being
denounced as a pedophile are two entirely different things.

If someone farts in your face repeatedly and you go on to punch them or harass
them in any way that is considered inappropriate by society, would you say
that your actions were 'justified?' To me, that would seem rather biblical, in
the negative sense: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

So the point is: we're still in the biblical era of social behaviour: if
someone harasses us, we harass back. Though I wouldn't know how to respond
'properly' and in a 'civilized' fashion to such a situation, even though I'm
an online gamer myself. In WoW, there's the anti-social practice of 'corpse-
camping' someone, and thus killing them repeatedly. In such cases I just log
off and play an alt, and let the camper waste his time.

~~~
rml
_If someone farts in your face repeatedly and you go on to punch them or
harass them in any way that is considered inappropriate by society, would you
say that your actions were 'justified?'_

Call me "biblical," but where I'm from farting in a grown man's face will get
you punched in your own face, repeatedly, in a _highly_ civilized manner.

[edit: formatting]

~~~
calcnerd256
And if we want to go New-Testament, we can make some "cheeky" puns about how
to respond.

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gizmo
> Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules.

Oh please. Even the article is a thinly veiled troll.

People often play after work, when they're tired and irritable. When somebody
continually ruins the game and turns what was intended to be a relaxing break
from life into another exercise in frustration he's going to be hated.

Online games tend to represent real societies pretty well. The older the game,
the more set the norms are, and the easier it is to be break the "unwritten"
rules.

Usually, when people go through something uncomfortable in the name of science
they're informed beforehand, and participate in the experiment on a volunteer
basis. Meyers did not have that decency -- he picked the members for his
experiment against their will.

~~~
Xichekolas
Yeah, the idea that he was stunned either makes him the most socially inept
person on the planet, or a complete troll of a person.

It's also perfectly within the rules to throw the basketball out of bounds
every time you get ahold of it, but if you did so, no one would want to play
with you. Would Myers likewise be stunned by this revelation?

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scott_s
I find the professor's conclusions a bit clueless. He was essentially a
griefer. He saw himself as someone who was persecuted by the community for
following the rules. But in something as complex as a MMORPG, the rules laid
down by the developers are less important than the gentleman's agreements
established by the community.

In short, people had fun doing it their way. They didn't have fun doing it his
way. If what he was doing had no impact on others, people probably wouldn't
care. But he was spoiling the experience for everyone he interacted with.

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carbon8
I'm going to go against the grain here: yeah, he was griefing them, but the
game and the players look worse here. If it's a PvP situation, then game
designers need to be aware of creative tactics people come up with. If the
game is unbalanced or someone starts using tactics outside of the spirit of
the game, the developers should patch the game.

This isn't pie in the sky stuff, either. Valve does it all the time with TF2,
and that's a big part of what makes it such a good game. By being aware of how
people use the game and working hard to maintain balance and stop overt
exploits, they've created a controlled environment that still allows people to
get extremely creative.

I now actively avoid any games with PvP that are so horribly designed that
cultures develop with unwritten rules to overcome shortcomings in the game.
And if you are playing a PvP game you should expect people to come up with
creative tactics and strategies to win.

~~~
qaexl
After sleeping on this, I finally figured out what was bothering me about the
massive number of responses here claiming that this Professor was being
clueless.

The basic assumption is that the Professor was griefing other players. He
wasn't. From the article, it did not appear as if he had the intent to
deliberately harass and annoy other players. Instead, he was merely _ignoring_
social customs and determining the best PvP strategies from there. Further, he
was attempting to conduct a study. I am assuming (big assumption) that he was
at least trying to be objective. In other words, there is nothing personal in
what he was doing.

The stunning results isn't that there were people who backlashed at him so
much as that, he perceived his actions as being impersonal, yet it seems many
of the people on CoH ... and here on Hacker News ... perceive his actions as
griefing. What is profound here is that this false perception generated an
incredible amount of backlash. It is the same mechanism used in witchhunts. It
looks like crowd sourcing has a downside too.

It implies that people still don't stop and consider whether the other person
was doing it out of ignorance or simply because that other person ignores
social conventions. The aggravation generated by this snowballs because people
want something to blame. What is also interesting to me is how otherwise
intelligent people automatically reacts to their own irritation.

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zimbabwe
Good read, but the findings aren't surprising. We all know there are social
rules that aren't set in stone but still adhered to. Being a dick online leads
to people hating you. Past that simple fact, the details aren't that
interesting, since hyperbole online is pretty easy. (See Kathy Sierra.)

It would be interesting to try to figure out how to handle social situations
and encode them into a game. How do you stop somebody from abusing the system?
The first thing that comes to mind is Super Smash Bros Brawl, which uses
random situations to stop one player from being too much of an asshole. (When
I play with my asshole friends, they disable items and force the level to the
ultraflat Final Destination so as to be able to abuse the game most
effectively - but in a more relaxed social setting, it's not as easy for an
obsessive to completely mess with the other players to a point where the game
isn't fun. Are there similar set-ups in any MMO?)

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noonespecial
In this case, "the rules of the game" are not like the laws and courts IRL,
which Myers would like us to accept, but more like the laws of physics.

MMO's are cool because a community develops and, just like in the real world,
organically evolves accepted laws and customs. _Good_ MMOs develop rich
communities and customs precisely by having very open frameworks.

Myers went around whacking people with a bat because the "laws of physics"
allowed him to. The only defference here is that it was much harder in the
game for the citizens to organize a police force to stop him, and as usual,
the "gods" (game moderators) were of no real use.

Ironically, in this context, he was the definition of a "super villain". On a
personal note, it irks me that this old doddard made such a colossal nuisance
of himself for _years_ to a whole community of gamers just for that goofy bit
of fluff he called a paper. Publish or perish indeed.

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newsio
The research article is here:

Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt
[http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university...](http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html)

The only thing I would like to add here is the study tested ethical codes of
conduct governing research. People weren't consulted, and they were
emotionally manipulated for the sake of the study. Surely that must have
raised red flags at Loyola.

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jrp
Fansy! <http://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm>

Seriously, what did the professor expect by griefing?

~~~
qaexl
You're assuming that the professor was griefing.

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ars
It's impossible to create a "perfect" set of rules. So just because he lived
within the rules doesn't mean anything.

Sometimes there are behaviors that are undesirable, but it's simply impossible
to legislate against them.

This is true in real life as well. Politicians tend to create more and more
and more complex rules, but no matter how detailed it's not possible to
legislate against every bad behavior. Especially without also creating
undesired side effects.

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keltecp11
This just brings back memories of the video with the kid who's mom canceled
his WOW account...

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torpor
This just in: University Professor discovers MOBBING. Entire World sighs in
relief, can finally put down the pitchforks, give each other hugs.

