It would be nice if we had a good and thorough description of Twixt’s behavior. But, however I describe that behavior, I don’t think that description is going to be believable — or, more importantly, persuasive — at this point. I can, however, certainly call bs on various posts I’ve seen floating around — most of all the long post by “CoH player” that appears, quoted verbatim, inside this Broken Toys entry, and which has been sent widely and energetically around the web. I’ve already, long ago inside the CoH forums, addressed and refuted most of these absurd template claims [and, once again, here], but that, of course, means nothing to an anonymous wall of mob.
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 is there a Twixt story at all?
But lets talk about something else. Let’s talk about the game.
There are a number of definitions of games floating around. I’m working on a paper now that summarizes several of these, in a manner similar to how Juul described and summarized these same game definitions in his keynote address to the 2003 DiGRA conference.
The above is taken from here.
Later, in Half-Real (2005), Juul extended and refined his summary to emphasize rules as integral to all games. Other game definitions emphasize the importance of rules as well – as you can see in the insert above.
Why makes rules so important? I like best the way the Suits explains things: Game rules are prohibitive. Game rules establish game goals and, simultaneously, game rules deny the most efficient means of achieving those goals. Without waiting for your opponent’s turn, for instance, you could easily win TicTacToe. But this then would be avoiding the obstacle to that goal (waiting your turn) established by the rules. It would be cheating.
More complex games have more complex rules, but the essential characteristics remain: Game rules are prohibitive; and these prohibitive rules assert and, simultaneously, deny game goals. This puts game goals and game rules in an odd, even paradoxical relationship. Because of the uneasy tension between – and within — rules and goals, game play occurs in peculiarly in-between, liminal state. And, therein, game play is distinct from other aesthetic experiences.
What if this rules-goals relationship is tampered with? If goals become too rigid, then the game becomes a simulation – something like a game, but not really a game. And if goals become too loose and flexible, the game becomes free play – again, something like a game, but different, and with a different set of consequences.
Likewise, when social rules substitute for or replace game rules, they do so at the expensive of the game’s liminal properties. 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.
Many have commented that the Twixt results are trivial and that I should not have been surprised things turned out the way they did. One would have to be very cynical indeed – even more cynical than I am, for instance – to believe that the death of games and gaming is trivial.
That drastically overstates the point, of course, but I do think that social rules and social pressures have, within online communities, already transformed our notion of what a game is and isn’t. My goodness, without even touching on the details of Twixt’s behavior, look at the response to the Twixt paper — and to me. Notice how little those responses reference game play and how adamantly those responses reference and reinforce a social behavior peripheral to game play.
Most surprisingly of all (maybe only to me), game designers themselves seem no longer interested in their rules. They seem to focus increasingly less on game rules and increasingly more on game rulers. Rulers don’t like the game rules? No problem. Eliminate those rules.
And then, of course, as I’ve said before…
Of course, in order for all this to work, not only do the game rules have to be deprioritized, but so too must the players who play by those game rules be deprioritized, marginalized, and, if at all possible, eliminated.
And it’s not so much fun to be eliminated.
***note: I've closed comments here, too many to handle. See here.
July 8, 2009 at 10:21 am
“Notice how little those responses reference game play and how adamantly those responses reference and reinforce a social behavior peripheral to game play.”
Which is completely unsurprising, as your behavior was not gameplay-transgressive, but rather socially transgressive. To insist on the consideration of gameplay in isolation, when an MMO is inherently social (hence “Massively Multiplayer”) is to be deliberately obtuse.
Paraphrasing from your post, let me assert some ideas:
1.) The majority of MMO players are more interested in social rules than game rules.
2.) MMO designers, in the interest of making money, loosen those rules.
3.) The majority of MMO players are happier, Designers make more money.
If the above statements are true, and everyone is indeed happier, then what’s the problem? In this particular case, it seems that the majority of the players simply disagree with your idea of the “right way” to play the game. But since you are the minority, frankly, your “right way” doesn’t carry much weight.
But this heralds the death of gaming! Except that this is a single game, in a single genre, from a broad spectrum of gaming options. If you are interested in multi-player games that are less social-focused and more gameplay-focused, might I suggest an FPS or RTS game? I doubt that you will find much standing about and chatting there. I am also told that EVE Online is fairly cutthroat, and might be more to your taste.
Alternately, you could round up a posse of like-minded individuals and organize “No Hold Barred Game Night” in RV. Put those social frameworks to good use, instead of just bitching about them.
July 8, 2009 at 10:29 am
The important part is that the socially transgressive play was, simultaneously, game rule compliant. That is, I did not choose to be socially transgressive; I chose to be game compliant. The socially transgressive part came, unwanted, with the territory. Don’t you find it odd that social rules contradict game rules rather than reinforce game rules? What’s up with that?
Games are (were, maybe) a unique and important formal aesthetic category. Without games, we would be less. Inside CoH, we are less.
July 8, 2009 at 11:46 am
There is so much inherent absurdity involved in this experiment that I shudder to consider the fact that it’s being pursued as a scholarly pursuit. Firstly, you’re holding up CoH/CoV to be some sort of exemplar for all of gaming, and making outlandish claims that players’ responses to patently sociopathic behavior signals the death knell of all of gaming. That is, in a word, ridiculous. CoH isn’t even the most exemplary game in its *genre,* let alone in all of gaming. Had your experiment taken place in, say, Eve, or better yet, in a balanced PvP environment that requires actual reflexive ability and has a polished rulset(like, say, America’s Army), one might be a little more moved by your hypothesis. As it stands, however, the execution and results are horribly tainted and flawed and simply appear to be a way to get your name in print even more.
The difference between the application of social rules in reality and the application of social rules in City of Heroes/Villains are myriad; the most obvious being the anonymity of the internet and John Gabriel’s Internet Dickwad Theory. You contradict your own philosophy repeatedly throughout this “experiment;” you (almost gleefully) admit to exploiting the game’s mechanics at the expense of the society at large, but then cry foul when the society at large exploits the internet’s mechanics to try to apply social mores to an antisocial personality. The basic nature of gaming is that each player must have something at *stake*, and by presenting yourself as an objective observer meddling in the entertainment pursuits of others, you attempted to absolve yourself of any personal stake in the game. What the assembled players appear to have done is to attempt to bring things into perspective for you–when your personal space is invaded, suddenly you have a stake in the outcome–a situation from which you rapidly removed yourself, because playing fair was never your intention in the first place. Rather than conform to the hive mind, you chose to hide behind your aegis of academia and stand on a soapbox, trumpeting the death of gaming. How egotistically outrageous! On top of that absurdity, you then had the cojones to feign surprise and disappointment at being bitten after having lain with the wolves.
I would posit that what represents the death of gaming is not your absurdist claims, but rather the prevalence of players like you; players who exploit the system for their own benefit, ignoring the socially accepted standards and practices to which everyone else adheres for their own personal benefit. Your presumption that your personal experiences are representative of some overall decline in the quality of gaming are akin to someone claiming that no one would be able to ever play Poker again because they were chased out of a game of Go Fish. If anything, all your experience proves is the age-old adage that if you play nice, people will want to play with you, and if you act like an asshole, people will want to beat you up.
July 8, 2009 at 11:57 am
Speaking solely as a lay person (and CoX player), I think there is a third factor involved that neither you nor Sean (nor most of your critics) are considering.
There are the game rules as implemented (you can/cannot do this).
There are the social rules as the various groups Twixt irked had developed them (you should/n’t do this for us to have a fun community).
But there are also the milieu rules, or the design rules (you should/n’t do this to be a super-hero in the context of CoX).
Both Twixt and, let us say, the farmers in RV, were following the game rules — clearly, since neither group was kicked off for their actions.
The farmers were following their own social rules. “Farming with friends is fun!”
Twixt was following the milieu rules. “I must defeat all villains and save Paragon City!”
But both the milieu rules and the social rules fall within the game rules. Both parties were “game compliant” — but Twixt took his goals from what the designers clearly intended, while the farms took their goals from what they found to be fun *and* allowed. Their social rules did not, in fact, contradict the game rules, but clearly contradicted the design/milieu rules.
Or maybe that’s just restating what you’ve said previously, and I’m mixing up how you are categorizing things.
I’ll disagree with the conclusion that the CoX Devs are letting the game be killed by social vs. design-intended play. The recent Mission Architect debacle (as well as other changes/nerfs) demonstrates that they are willing to act against blatant farming and other counter-milieu activities, even if lots of people are doing it and complain bitterly when the Devs do so.
That said, for whatever reason (resources, concern over how large of a problem it is), the counter-design social rules Twixt’s opponents followed in RV (farming, coexisting factions, ignoring the zone design goals, railing against the Teleport Foe ploy) were not considered major enough problems to fix (I can think of several ways any of them could have been addressed, though not the development effort to make them happen). But I’ve not seen a loosening of the rules that would allow purely social / non-milieu behavior, just continuing ingenuity in bypassing what rules there are to prevent it from players (to the game’s detriment).
July 8, 2009 at 12:11 pm
“admit to exploiting the game’s mechanics”
Never. Where do people get this idea? Blatant falsehood. Tping into geometry, for instance, is exploiting game mechanics. Never did. Using spam tells to clog opponents com channels, exploit. Never did.
Also, exploiters, like Fansy the Famous Bard, for instance, never die. They have a guaranteed win strategy. Twixt never had that. Twixt killed a lot of people, believe me, but then a lot of people killed Twixt too. I really don’t know where people get these ideas that Twixt was exploiting something. Very annoying.
Note also: I never had any problems with farmers farming in rv, as long as they had no problems with me attacking them as they did so. Silly game-design-oriented me considered that part of the farming risk-reward thing. Plus, some of the most persistent farmers would simply die and come back again and again. What could I do? Eventually I would have to leave. Or the farmers would park the hvys and wait in the base. Or the farmers would use their invis/stealth to hover at the top of the zone. Or the farmers would run all the way to the base whenever I came close. Totally up to them. I didn’t try to make their in-game experience a social hell. I didnt go and ruin their farming tfs. I didnt leave messages impugning their character on the forums. I tried to kill them in rv. If they wanted to try to kill me in rv, a-okay. More fun for everybody, seems to me.
But, of course, that’s not what happened. Try to look at your argument and tell me if that argument is truly egalitarian. Does your argument give every player an equal chance to play the game — by the rules of the game — or not?
A critical difference between the game rules and the social rules is that the game rules are the same for every one — and the social rules are not. The social rules have an in-crowd and an out-crowd, perks, favors, alliances, politics. The game rules just have the game rules.
I know precisely what my intention was. What is/was yours?
July 8, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Well said… I was mulling over this exact point at lunch, but would not have put it so well.
The best analogy I could come up with is this: Cryptic provided us with a basketball court, a ball, some baskets, and a scoreboard. Obviously, a large number of people have chosen to take those pieces and play Calvinball. Professor Myers’ assertion is that his method of play is better because he is playing basketball. But in an analogous situation in the real world, where 20 people were playing Calvinball and one person ran onto the court and started playing basketball, that one person would face social ramifications — because he is being a douche. Is he “right”? That’s debatable — if 20 Calvinball players are having fun, I’m inclined to say no. The factor that irks me most is that there is room for Basketball and Calvinball players on the court, but the Basketball player insists that everyone play basketball.
To put it another way (and borrowing liberally from the parent post): rules in computer games are hard-coded. If there was a Rule that you must kill villains in RV, then your character would explode if he didn’t get in a fight for more than five minutes. Since there is no such Rule, the choice to rigidly enforce the “intended use” of RV becomes a social choice — with social ramifications.
July 8, 2009 at 12:17 pm
fun/milieau rules may be fun (and milieau-ish), but they are not game rules.
Even more important is that, as I observed things, the fun/milieau rules were often actively opposed to the game rules. They were eating the game rules like some kind of ugly green mold. The point of this post is that game rules are important and need to be observed and, if necessary, protected. Unfortunately, the game rules seem to have few protectors and fun/milieu rules seem to have lots, who, based on the Twixt experience, like to pile on.
July 8, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Analogies are tricky.
Im okay with Calvinball (though I dont really know what it is), because I think its a game. Does it have game rules. K, then,fine.
Problem with the Twixt situation was that the game rules werent being replaced by another set of game rules, but by social/political authority. No game, just a pile on.
July 8, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I fail to see your point — you seem to be confusing the consequences with the game. If the game is “PvP Without Droning People”, then that is a game, and apparently a great many people play that game. If the game is “Cooperate and Farm”, then that is a game. Those people whose play you disrupted were playing a game — and you made a social choice to be a douche and disrupt their game. THEN there were social consequences. People piled on because you were being a douche — again, a social consequence of your disrupting the game they were playing. I’d say the analogy stands up pretty well — if you see a flaw, I’d be curious to hear how.
Of course, you’ll have to do it in a column 4 characters wide — this comment software sucks.
July 8, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Just reading up on this case, I am intrigued by the results of your study – however the way your reached them and your dealings with the CoH community leaves a bittersweet flavour in my mouth.
I asked some questions in my blogpost, any questions would be appreciated.
July 8, 2009 at 12:56 pm
The salient point that you’re overlooking is that you’re playing a game that *revolves* around social rules. There are two critical issues that you’re apparently choosing to ignore:
1) MMOs are *social games.* They are not hard-coded rulesets without gray areas; they’re evolutionary constructs reactive to the will of the populace (Game Experience May Change During Play!). If the majority of the game society believes that your actions are antisocial, then guess what? Your actions are antisocial, as evidenced by the fact that you were roundly despised by both factions.
2) MMOs like CoH/CoV are *for-profit enterprises*. They are not a great communal experiment funded by grants or the government. The MANY dictate the rules, not the FEW, because the MANY pay the bills. Why you seem to continually overlook this glaring fact in favor of theoretical musings about “how things should be” mystifies me. I’m certain that, had you taken some grant funding and developed your OWN game, your experiment would have been significantly more objective and valid, but you chose to thrust yourself and your expectations into a world that was not designed around you–and then cry foul that the world didn’t react the way you wanted it to.
If you’re looking for an open sandbox where the players have an equal chance to play by whatever rules they deem fair, there are plenty of them out there, but it’s a widely-accepted notion that, even in “open” games, social mores still develop and the many police the few, or the game fails.
Decrying CoH/CoV for not being one of these environments seems counter-intuitive to me; this entire exercise reads like someone who didn’t read the fine print, then wrote a scathing diatribe of the product (and the milieu-at-large) because it was convenient.
Having read the paper, I think there are some interesting points made, but the praxis seems to be horribly flawed to me–it seems as though you’re willfully obtuse about the population with which you’re interacting while simultaneously applying extraordinarily narrow expectations of a necessarily broad genre.
July 8, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Hi Kristine, read your post, was gonna leave rply there, but I eschew registration, so here you go:
Interesting analysis. The main question I would throw at you is what is griefing?
So far I’ve been accused of exploiting (never happened) trolling (never happened) and griefing (never happened — I don’t think, you may be able to tell me otherwise). These seem to be labels that get thrown around without much clarity or specificity. They also seem to have very different meanings in different social settings (and, perhaps, within different theoretical perspectives as well). Since I’m both intrigued and working on this definition thing right now, your opinion would be of help to me.
Another set of brief thought experiments:
What if, instead of “playing them” as you put it, I were “playing you”? That is, what if my Twixt persona then were more real than my professor persona now? What then?
Or, what if I never intended to do research or write a paper and I just showed up inside CoH, played the game, and then, later sometime, wrote about my experiences — like people do on their blogs for instance. What then?
Or (only one more), suppose, since you mention the difficult of accessing certain social groups, that there was no other way — NONE — to access the pvp context that I looked at in the Twixt paper other than the method I used. What then?
July 8, 2009 at 1:23 pm
The game in RV was a game, it was designed as a game, sold as a game, it had game rules, it had game players, it even had game fun. Then the social rules came crashing down.
My point is that “social games” as you call them are not, in fact, games, and that “social games” diminish the (important and valuable) game experience. That was the point of my little diatribe about rules.
If you are saying that currently mmos are the improper place to play a game, then I think I am agreeing with you. It doesn’t have to be that way, but, yes, it probably is. I think that was demonstrated to Twixt quite clearly, and I think the paper makes that point.
It’s just that I seem to regret the loss of the game, and you don’t. Nevertheless, I think I got it: Dear Twixt, go the f away.
July 8, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I do wonder if the results would have been different, had you communicated your intentions and desires at the time as clearly and forthrightly as you are doing so now. I still believe that your position on the nature and purpose of RV was one of several possible arguments that could be supported by the design of the zone and its reward structure, and I wonder if you would have found more support or at least tolerance for your position if you had articulated it verbally as well as in action.
You could say, I suppose, that being correct is enough, and that it shouldn’t be necessary to have to engage with others socially to convince them of this. But in my experience, that’s not how things actually work – not in games, and not outside them either. As an educator, I would be surprised if you did not explain to your students why what you tell them is true, and I imagine you expect the same from them. Bald assertions don’t suffice – even correct ones.
Why didn’t you forthrightly engage your critics at the time, instead of now? You may have been the least effective advocate of your position, but I don’t think you’re the only one who ever asserted that the purpose of the PvP zones should be to play the zone control game using every available tactic. The few times I visited Sirens Call (which visits were primarily for the purpose of getting the 5-hours-in-zone badge, a goal often achieved by camping while dead or in the hospital – within the rules, but very frustrating for those trying to play the bounty capture game!), I was one of the few people playing the zone control game there by fighting NPCs at the rotating hotspots, and I would have enjoyed more competition in that aspect.
At this point the strongest criticism I can level at you is not that your position was categorically wrong, but that you were a (possibly deliberately) bad advocate for it.
July 8, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Hi Sean, Im gonna start the reply-reply chain over, because this format seems to get very awkward.
I believe we are disagreeing on whether player consensus can determine rules of play or not. Yes, it can, but only when that consensus is a true consensus of all players who play. Game rules have to be the same for everyone. Social rules do not; in fact, social rules have to be DIFFERENT for at least some “players.” Game rules are inclusive; social rules are exclusive. That’s probably the best way to tell the two apart.
Thus, there is no “game without droning.” Doesn’t exist, no matter what the social rules say about it.
This, btw, is an issue I address in the book; it is a problem rooted (I believe) in a much larger cultural studies framework. It’s a big problem.
One of the consequences of this problem is, if you hold to a cultural studies position — an essentially relativist position — then discussions like this will inevitably take you nowhere: there is no resolution.
Or, alternatively, there is this resolution: I am a douche. (Same thing really — and did you see my post on Arrington-Laporte?)
July 8, 2009 at 1:44 pm
In fairness to you, I guess what confused the issue for me is that you seem to be restating a concept that most gamers are already quite familiar with: MMOs are usually not the place for PvP. This facet of gaming has existed for as long as MMOs have, and can be directly correlated to the miserable failure of many (if not most) PvP-centric MMO games.
The more depressing conclusion that I think is revealed in this fact of gaming life is that, given the choice between pursuing a challenge and simply performing the same task repeatedly, the vast majority of people choose to perform the same task repeatedly–hence the success of games like WoW while lesser known games like Bohemian’s ‘Armed Assault’ exist in relative ignominy: playing against other players is HARD. Most people don’t want their game to be hard. They want time spent to directly correlate to progress.
That’s where my initial surprise stems from; the idea that farmers are somehow new to the MMO genre–I think a pretty serious argument could be made that farmers *dominate* the MMO genre. By and large, competitive gamers avoid the genre because PvP is seen as “disruptive” rather than “fun.”
That being said, I’m still under the impression that you pursued dubious methods in your pursuit of personal fun, and that there were probably better ways to try to find a fair fight, but hey, that’s just my opinion.
July 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I think it might be worthwhile to point out a counterexample: Guild Wars, which has a thriving community of PvE and PvP players. It seems to manage this by clearly and unambiguously separating which parts of the game are intended for which activity, in a way that City of Heroes definitely does not.
July 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm
In Dr. Myers defense, I can see why he would have kept his intentions secret. It’s the old anthropological assertion that a community that knows it’s being observed will react differently when it knows the observer is watching, thereby tainting any results.
My analysis of the experiment is that the above tainting would have been the least of Dr. Myers’ worries, given the relatively unscientific method he applied and the dubiousness of the results, but from a formalist perspective I agree with the decision to obscure his identity and motives until he had garnered what research he felt he needed.
With that said, my opinion is also that, intentionally or not, he had a personal investment in the game world and that he allowed that personal involvement to cloud his judgment and skew his results. That’s a matter of opinion though, and unprovable.
July 8, 2009 at 1:54 pm
A big part of the reason that Guild Wars can accomplish that is that there’s no monthly fee. Subscription-based models seem to inevitably fall into the trap that time=money, and since the monthly fee is the revenue stream, the devs cater to the farmer mentality.
Also, wordpress’s handling of multiple comments is terrible.
July 8, 2009 at 2:00 pm
However, he wouldn’t have had to reveal his identity in order to make a verbal argument for his position. The game, and the boards, are pseudonymous.
And no, I do not consider Twixt’s poetry to constitute a convincing argument – for many reasons, but chiefly because, in the event, it wasn’t.
July 8, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I don’t know that we’re differing in opinion on whether player consensus defines rules — clearly, any rule not defined by the physical rules of the world must be agreed upon by all players playing — but, rather, whether all participants in a shared virtual space are required to play the same game. I hate to harp on it, but the basketball analogy seems to hold: if there is sufficient room on the court to play basketball and calvinball, why must everyone be compelled to play basketball? Alternately, if two people are standing in some distant corner of the court chatting, why must they be compelled to play, unless their presence disrupts the game?
Your contention seems to be that everyone in the virtual space is playing the same game, and are thus obligated to participate in the “right way to play”, even if you are the only one playing that way. But in the same breath, you claim that these social rules are somehow limiting _your_ creative expression when, in actuality, you’re just being excluded because you aren’t respecting the rights of others.
Oh no — not rights! I have to come at it from a fundamentally libertarian point of view — your rights end where mine begin. I’ll play the way I want to play, and you play the way you want to play, and we’ll only need to invoke “the rules” when those two styles come into conflict. Or, from a practical standpoint, why do I want to compel someone to play with me that has no interest in doing so? Who has fun in that case (except my malicious joy at tormenting someone — again, because I’m a douche)? What aspect of a virtual (as opposed to a physical) space invalidates these social rules? I would bet money that you wouldn’t try this crap in the real world.
July 8, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Welcome to the meta-game. Any game involving more than 1 person will inevitably develop a layer of social rules which softly govern its play. It is in no way unique to CoH or even MMOs. Take basketball, which has been used for other examples already, for many years there were certain strategies that were not used solely because they were not considered acceptable by the participants. They’ve since been used effectively and either been accepted as part of the game or banned by game rules, but those bannings were due to social pressure. Magic the Gathering also has an extensive meta game with some players simply refusing to participate against certain deck archetypes since in their opinion they lessen the fun of the game. This essentially eliminates these deck types, at least within that social circle. Even something as simple as checkers between 2 people will often develop these unwritten rules.
No, this is not he death of gaming but merely a continuation of where it has always been so long as it has involved more than one person.
July 8, 2009 at 3:26 pm
“Why didn’t you forthrightly engage your critics at the time, instead of now?”
I made my goals clear. The paper, as I remember, indicates the (consistent) response I got to calls to win the zone or to cheers from having won: “lol stfu nub, nobody cares about that sh*t”
I was an antagonistic advocate of my position. You may consider that more “bad” than I do. Opposition, like rules, is an integral part of game play — so I can see some consistency in adopting this sort of advocacy position.
Other suggestions are, I think, that I should have negotiated some sort of compromise with other players. A compromise is an acceptance of the social rules. Why should I have compromised? To avoid harassment? Why is harassment necessary to enforce compromise? Harassment is not necessary to enforce game rules.
There were several times, in the beginning, when Twixt grouped with other players to take down the pillboxes and win the zone. This, however, was a more difficult activity than most wished to pursue. I agree that one reason social rules were imposed in rv was because the game rules were too complex, or took too much time, or were too hard. But they weren’t too hard for everyone. And so that too me is an excuse, or an opportunity, for social rules to begin to encroach on game rules, not a justification.
Im still having trouble understanding why there is this steadfast defense of “majority rules” in a game context, particularly if the majority would seem to eventually want to eliminate all games, all oppositions, and all non-social rules of play.
It doesn’t seem to be because you believe the majority is necessarily right. Is it really just because of the money? The subscriptions? Or is it because of the expediencies?
Isn’t there some important loss connected to transforming game into society — or *masquerading* game as society? Do community concerns really outweigh all others?
Also, it seems uncertain that game designers are allowing and guiding this transformation of game into society. It seems more that they are simply going with the flow. If so, then can’t really call them artists/designers anymore — more like travel agents maybe.
July 8, 2009 at 3:32 pm
“Welcome to the meta-game.”
Thank you. I have been here before.
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” in 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.
July 8, 2009 at 4:03 pm
“Why should I have compromised?”
To avoid antagonizing others. I suspect this is a value we do not share. In my personal ethical system, antagonizing others without sufficient cause is to be avoided, and advancing a thesis on the use of a shared game space doesn’t seem to be enough reason to me.
Yes, this also means that those who harassed you were also in the wrong. I never asserted that they were right to harass you, but it’s difficult for me to distinguish between your antagonistic advocacy of your position and their antagonistic advocacy of theirs – and once you have decided that compromise is impossible, what is left but antagonism?
“Isn’t there some important loss connected to transforming games into societies?”
That depends on whether City of Heroes was ever intended to be a game and not a society. Given that a society almost unavoidably springs up whenever you create a space of shared communication, and that the developers almost certainly were aware of this and indeed relied on it for their revenue model, I am guessing the answer is “no.” I think some extremely cogent points were made above regarding how the per-time subscription model favors setups that keep people interested over a long period, and societal bonds keep people coming back long after the amusement potential of a pure game has been exhausted. You may call it a cynical cash-grab, but there is obviously a large set of people – myself included – who will pay over time for continued access to a social context.
In short, what I am saying is that MMOs are, and have always been, societies masquerading as games – or rather, social spaces that include tools for shared entertainment. In that interpretation, of course social cohesion trumps game rules, as the central focus and main draw is the society and not the game.
There are games, with thousands if not millions of players, that are definitely not societies (although they may be played by social groups). That City of Heroes is not one of them does not mean that the existence of games as games is threatened. If you had instead studied a game-first game such as, say, Team Fortress 2, and found that trying to win the game as effectively as possible garnered you not only the occasional verbal abuse (ie rocket whore) but active shunning, then I think you might have a stronger case.
July 8, 2009 at 4:17 pm
What I don’t understand is your belief that your tactics were effective or illustrative of designer intent.
You used strategies your opponents found objectionable. They hated it and so did the people you were supposed to be allied with. If the intent of game designers was for you to team up with allies against the villains in order to win the zone, then by your own admission your strategy was a failure. Your own allies refused to work with you. You were playing against your own team, which according to your understanding of designer intent, is not how the game was to be played.
Further, while it’s not comforting to know that someone threatened to physically harm you, I find it hard to believe you were shocked by this occurence. I don’t think a statement like “Some people on the Internet take things too far” breaks much new ground.
Likewise, your concern about people taking things out of game seems feigned. Don’t you think it’s a bit hypocritical to cite instances where the “abuse” you suffered continued beyond the confines of the game while you are busily writing an academic paper in which you name of all the people with whom you had disagreements, and go on to allow their names to be published in your local paper? If these were not real, identifiable people I might have more sympathy for you, but as it is it seems you have done far more harm to the players who insulted you than they you.
July 8, 2009 at 4:25 pm
You don’t like the meta-game, that’s a perfectly valid personal opinion. I don’t like certain aspects of the metagames surrounding certain games. But that is neither here nor there.
The point is that metagames have existed and will continue to exist for any and all games played by more than one person. The fact that you think they shouldn’t is your prerogative but ultimately pointless. You can effect them by changing the game rules or participant opinion but if you want them eliminated then your only option is to go single player.
Professional sports based metagames are so closely policed because there the they involve money. They and any other heavily monetized game have a specific and concrete motivation that no amount of social pressure can overcome. Even then though the only difference is that the rules have been put to paper and the level of punishment has been upped from social to financial. It’s still a metagame, it’s still put in place by the participants feelings of how the game should or should not be played, it’s simply a more formalized process.
I also find your definition of “game” to be a bit skewed as well. You act as if a game must have only clearly defined rules, which is simply not the case. In Hide and Go Seek for example it would roundly be considered unfair to hide in a locked, or otherwise inaccessible to the seeker, location. Anyone doing so would be chastised by the other participants or perhaps even banned from play, through simply ignoring them. That’s not a hard and fast written rule, recited by the players before any game it’s simply understood. It’s part of the metagame of playing that game in that social group.
You can call it meta-bs, you can not like it, but it doesn’t change its historical, future, and continued existence one bit. Groups of players have always and will always construct a metagame of unwritten social rules for which there will be a social backlash if they are breached.
July 8, 2009 at 4:31 pm
The indications I used to determine designer intent were the published rules of the game (online RV description, for instance), the EULA, the software mechanics/code, and the response of the game moderators (what was or wasnt banned). What my “opponents found objectionable” was never an indication of designer intent. This issue goes back to distinguishing between game rules and social rules; some times this distinction may be more obvious than other times. A primary distinction (mentioned earlier) is that game rules are inclusive and social rules are exclusive.
I was not so much shocked by my opponents being angry and as what they were angry about. If we were playing chess, and you got very angry that I moved my bishop — just moved my bishop, thats all — then I would be equally surprised.
I broached this issue of names in the forums. Most seem to enjoy seeing their names in print — unless its in my kill log maybe. I have subsequently changed all names, however, in order to address this issue. I really don’t think there is any reason to do so. In-game names are untraceable — unless their owners choose otherwise — and these in-game names frequently rotate and change from owner to owner, not to mention existing in duplicate form on many different servers. I used no globals or any other indication — email addresses, etc. — that would in any way identify individual players.
July 8, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I do not believe you would be a very good hide-and-seek player.
July 8, 2009 at 5:24 pm
And I believe you’d eventually be banned from playing most games in the majority of social circles due to your unwillingness to follow social rules. I’m OK with both of our beliefs.
July 8, 2009 at 5:34 pm
“You don’t like the meta-game.”
I love the meta-game — when it’s a game. One of the analogies I use to describe game play is a spiraling series of contexts: recursive contextualization. Like in Civilization when you start worried about your city placement and your goody huts and then eventually you are more worried about World Wonders and such. Games tend to break out of their rules and into another set of rules and so on. But if those games break out into nothing but society, the bubble pops and the game goes away. So sad. I just don’t like to use the term “meta-game” because sometimes it’s used to mean what I think it should mean and sometimes it’s used to mean, like I said earlier, meta-bs.
“because there the they involve money”
Nah, it’s because they involve integrity — or are supposed to. Integrity, fairness, equality — inequity aversion stuff, which is the stuff of games rather than societies.
I’m still thinking that hide-and-seek thing about you btw.
July 8, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Thanks for the response and intriguing questions. Didnt think my blog required registering, but will double check.
To start with griefing. Since you are concerned with the ruleset of games I understand why griefing would be an interesting entry point. Greifing in my book is play which deliberately disrupts other peoples gameplay (think Taylor 2006 is on the somewhat same definition). In such it puts an emphasis on intention in addition to actual practice. While many of the activities you described on Twixt might not have been seen as griefing in all circumstances, your stated intent on testing social rules, going against norm etc. is what defines it as such. If you told a story of killing other players because you found it challenging, or because you didnt understand how other players felt about it- I see it as unlikely that anyone would put such a label on you. noob perhaps, but not greifer.
“That is, what if my Twixt persona then were more real than my professor persona now?”
However your professor persona is answerable to an academic community while Twixt is not. So to answer your next question as well: it is exactly because you are a scholar using your experiences for research that I am asking for reasons behind this exploration. If you were simply a blogger writing about your griefing strategies in game, others would be free to hate you and you would be free to claim that you also pay your 15$s worth. It is the further ethical considerations as a researcher that makes it problematic.
It is very possible that it is, who I am to judge which matters the most to you? Personally I feel quite strongly about my VV avatars
If you have tried other methods to explore the idea of griefing or social ruleset and found them inadequate, I understand how closed observation becomes an option. However, from the paper I read- I couldnt find such a discussion. If you believe its the BEST method to use, by all means argue it. Exploring VV and games is also exploring new possible methods and approaches, I think most of us are trying out different ways to enter our material. I am simply asking that such as discussion is brought to the forefront, and think further work in this topic would benefit greatly from it. If anything, the responses to your research gives valuable insights to others on reactions that can erupt and what to expect if others choose to follow the same path.
As a last point:
The gamer in me (again, who is to say what weighs heavier) would have wanted an extensive explenation and even an apology from someone who wilfully disrupted my play for research benefits.
The exploitation / trolling / griefing labellings intrigues me. I will mull’em over and try to put down my definitions. It does meet at a fruitful intersect between social rules, technical possiblity and emergent play. Worth continuing exploring!
July 8, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I was not so much shocked by my opponents being angry and as what they were angry about. If we were playing chess, and you got very angry that I moved my bishop — just moved my bishop, thats all — then I would be equally surprised.
I’d be more willing to buy this if it weren’t for your stated comment that you stopped playing after I13 and “disappointing decisions by the developers”. What disappointing decisions? Hmm, perhaps the way that they overhauled PvP in part to eliminate people doing things like using Teleport Foe to get other players killed by the drones?
You seem to imply that once the devs made it more difficult for you to play in a deliberately antagonistic manner, it stopped being fun for you. That pretty much says it all.
July 8, 2009 at 7:23 pm
“once you have decided that compromise is impossible, what is left but antagonism?”
ARGH. The Game Rules!
The game rules are left. And the game rules btw SUPPORT antagonism (though I would rather call it more generically “opposition”)
July 8, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Honestly, it was more the brain-dead movement suppression more than anything else. Why take the single characteristic that made the game unique, fast, and fun, and kill it for some yet-to-be-determined solution? It did not seem right.
Of course, phase and hiber were also fairly annoying.
tp droning still works just about as well as ever btw
July 8, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Well, I think, right away, that any definition of griefing that is player-based (either player intent or player harm suffered) is going to be untenable. He said, she said. In order to make griefing make sense you have to give it a formal definition based on the the game system rather than the game players. Cheating and spoilsport, for instance, Huizinga’s terms, could be considered griefing. Both these refer to rules alone, but in a different way. Cheating breaks game rules. Spoilsporting breaks the rules governing the rules: the spirit of the game. In the case of spoilsporting though, you would still have to refer to “rules governing rules” as a formal system rather than as a player construct. While this “rules governing rules” system might be a bit fuzzier than the rules system, it could well be extrapolated from that rules system.
Based on such a defintion, btw, Twixt was no griefer. He would be rather better labeled an anti-griefer.
July 8, 2009 at 7:39 pm
tp droning still works just about as well as ever btw
I’ll take your word for it.
That illustrates the other problem with your “study”. I’ve had an account since I1; I’ve actively played for 42 months. I play on Pinnacle, Liberty, Infinity, and Virtue, and the only time I go into PvP zones is by accident, or once into Bloody Bay to finish my Shivan badge. You claimed Twixt was “universally reviled”, and maybe he was, among the minority of players who do PvP on Champion and Freedom.
The overwhelming majority of players who concentrate on team-based PvE have never heard of Twixt, and your conclusions make very little sense when applied outside of a very limited context. Twixt’s behavior wouldn’t have been appropriate in a team context–and the most likely result would have been that no one invited you to team. Without referencing the PvE side of the game–which is clearly intended to be social–your conclusions suffer from too small of a sample size to be at all useful.
July 8, 2009 at 7:41 pm
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.
This is utterly ridiculous, and shows a complete lack of understanding of your subject matter. By definition an MMORPG involves large numbers of people interacting and role-playing, making social interaction as much the point of the game as racking up XP and influence. That’s why you have supergroups, and Pocket D, and costume contests, and co-op zones, and all of the other content intended to give players more opportunities to interact with their friends.
To use a direct game-related analogy, it’s like you joined an in-progress D&D campaign and proceeded to act like you were playing Neverwinter Nights on your PC, playing rules lawyer when the DM’s decisions didn’t fall exactly in line with the sourcebooks and getting upset when other players went off on bantering tangents. You’re playing a game with an important social component as if it were designed to play solo, and you’re insisting that the other players, the ones who do understand that it’s a social thing, are the ones who are doing it wrong.
July 8, 2009 at 7:50 pm
“universally reviled”
Just felt that way I guess. I do say that, though, to make the point that every server I visited (3 and a half) with Twixt in RV resulted in the same level and extent of revilery. This is another part that amazed me personally: that the reaction I received did NOT seem peculiar to any particular population of players. I am very willing to bet that, if you had known Twixt, you would have reviled him too.
July 8, 2009 at 8:10 pm
This is actually one of things I am most certain of.
For instance, look at the pvp teams on the CoH test server and how they negotiate the rules of their self-constructed tournaments/competitions/engagements. You will see much more jockeying for position, posturing, and such than actual competition — until the rules are agreed upon among all parties involved. And, even then, with the *game rules* of the competition continually in flux, the *social rules* come into play and tend to delay, postpone, and inhibit actual game play. Much *less* play takes place when social rules dominate than when they don’t. Very common. And another indication of social rules actively in opposition with game rules.
Your other point, about large groups necessarily causing social interaction to be the “point” of the game is entirely arbitrary. Social interaction isn’t the point of football, or other team-based sports. It may well be that games are better suited for smaller numbers of people than larger numbers of people, but that just means that larger numbers of people dont really play games at all — not that larger groups of people play the misnomer of “social games.” A “social game” is probably better represented as a “social hierarchy” or a “social power struggle.” People do those as lot. But, strictly speaking, they are not games.
July 8, 2009 at 8:13 pm
If I may ask, why did you choose the game CoH/V for this experiment, instead of a more PvP oriented game like Age of Conan?
July 8, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Much *less* play takes place when social rules dominate than when they don’t. Very common. And another indication of social rules actively in opposition with game rules.
Again, you’re only talking about PvP. There are social rules in PvE that you could argue are not part of the game. It’s not against the rules to post LFT messages every five minutes in Broadcast channel, or to send blind team invites to people who’ve specifically requested that you don’t do so. Of course, breaking those rules is
why didn’t you try deliberately breaking those? Why focus on the part of the game that’s played by a minority?
Your other point, about large groups necessarily causing social interaction to be the “point” of the game is entirely arbitrary. Social interaction isn’t the point of football, or other team-based sports.
No, but it is the point of an RPG, which is part of the definition of an MMORPG. Comparing CoX to football is comparing apples to squid: both are organic and can be eaten, which is about the only similarity. Again, I’m asking if you’d go into a D&D game and deliberately flout the house rules on the grounds that the intent of the game is only what’s in the sourcebook?
You’re arguing that a game and a social community are mutually exclusive categories, which indicates a narrow definition of “game” that’s specifically designed to prove your thesis.
July 8, 2009 at 8:24 pm
“others would be free to hate you and you would be free to claim that you also pay your 15$s worth”
I was almost thinking I would rather be a blogger up to this point. I heard this argument a lot in RV: I pay, I can do what I want. The caveat is that individual player actions — particularly in competitive games, REAL games — have consequences on their fellow players. It was very discouraging in RV to see hero farmers because, while I could kill the vill farmers, I could do nothing with the hero farmers. They would take and hog the hvys for hours at a time, throwing a monkey wrench into the whole zone game design. One thing that makes games — REAL games — work is that everyone is abiding by the same set of rules. (This is also relevant to some other comment back up there asking why everyone has to play the same game.) Everyone has to play the same game because that’s the way games create their particular aesthetic value. If your opponent is just faking it, it’s no fun. If your opponent is unskilled and unlearned, it’s no fun. It’s almost paradoxical in that competitive games — REAL games — require more cooperation from all involved than do so-called “cooperative” and social “games.” And that’s also another reason why social “games” aren’t really games, and, perhaps, also why it is so easy for game designers to push social “games” over real games: because player behavior in social “games” doesnt really matter. For a game to be a game, play has to MATTER on the basis of game form and design, not on the basis of something other than game form and design like, for instance, how much money you pay each month.
July 8, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I am very willing to bet that, if you had known Twixt, you would have reviled him too.
Quite likely, since you deliberately set out to be a jerk. “New research shows that if you poke people with sticks, they get upset: film at 11.”
July 8, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I mention in the paper more than a couple of reasons. The main ones are the ability to observe all sorts of players in the same pvp zone, the open com channels between factions, and the clear (I still think and maintain) game goals and rules inside the zone. Also, I had some weighty experience with CoH and was much better able to effectively judge and evaluate player reactions in that context than another.
Currently inhibiting research into most mmos is the great burden of leveling characters up, gaining gear, etc. that is required in order to experience the full range of the game’s possibilities and rules.
July 8, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Who says the game is about what YOU say it is? I would rather, as I did in RV, refer to the game designer’s intentions and, even more explicitly, the game’s rules set.
Obviously, all of my observations concerning Twixt took place inside RV, so I feel most comfortable defining and describing the RV game. Other contexts, as you say, would no doubt be different. Still the formal properties of a game — rules, goals, opposition, and such — would remain the same.
July 9, 2009 at 12:39 am
It would be nifty if you’d drop by MetaFilter and join the discussion about your exercise in this thread:
http://www.metafilter.com/83101/Thanks-for-ruining-the-game-for-me-Really
July 9, 2009 at 3:04 am
I’ve now read your some of your posts from your City of Heroes era. The excerpt below is a copy of what was said on those forums, and is being hosted http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu. I will assume it is you who saved the thread. A user named “Fasque” who signed his posting as “Twixt” posted a number of times. A portion of one of those posts is reproduced below. I think it paints a quite different picture of events than either your essay or your media interview portray. I will leave it to you and your conscience on whether you choose to explain the disparity. If nothing else your accounts of your interactions with players are deeply misleading.
02514: 03-26-2008 20:51:24 [Broadcast]Twixt: well, i would kill you all and win the zone but too many hero farmers
02515: 03-26-2008 20:51:30 [Broadcast]Twixt: hero slimeball lowlife farmers
02518: 03-26-2008 20:51:34 [Broadcast]Twixt: as usuall, vills np
02519: 03-26-2008 20:51:43 [Broadcast]Twixt: but hero lowlife slimeball farmers ruin the zone
02520: 03-26-2008 20:51:46 [Broadcast]Twixt: wat a pity
02530: 03-26-2008 20:52:31 [Broadcast]Twixt: no, little lowlife slimeball farmer boy, U ruin it
02534: 03-26-2008 20:52:48 [Broadcast]Twixt: its trivial to hog the hvys and farm the zone
02535: 03-26-2008 20:52:57 [Broadcast]Twixt: any can do it, any can cheat
02537: 03-26-2008 20:53:04 [Broadcast]Twixt: read the rulez, play the game
02539: 03-26-2008 20:53:10 [Broadcast]Twixt: otherwise, who the f cares
02541: 03-26-2008 20:53:36 [Broadcast]Twixt: congrats, another night of farmer bois
02542: 03-26-2008 20:53:43 [Broadcast]Twixt: wallow in it, little farmer bois
02543: 03-26-2008 20:53:46 [Broadcast]Twixt: you the mans
02879: 03-26-2008 21:18:13 [Broadcast]Twixt: faraq lowlife slimeball farmer, check
02890: 03-26-2008 21:19:35 [Broadcast]Twixt: im ignorning your little slimeball lowlife farmer [censored], gl, miserable cheater pos
03-26-2008 21:19:53 ka faraq gatri is now ignored
Another excerpt from the same post:
02934: 03-26-2008 21:28:17 [Broadcast]Twixt: its all about phase
02935: 03-26-2008 21:28:20 [Broadcast]Twixt: nothing but phase
02936: 03-26-2008 21:28:27 [Broadcast]Twixt: thats it basically
02937: 03-26-2008 21:28:29 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
02938: 03-26-2008 21:28:34 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
02954: 03-26-2008 21:29:56 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
02955: 03-26-2008 21:30:00 [Broadcast]Twixt: thats yoru choice
02956: 03-26-2008 21:30:03 [Broadcast]Twixt: make your choice
02957: 03-26-2008 21:30:08 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
02985: 03-26-2008 21:32:26 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
02987: 03-26-2008 21:32:30 [Broadcast]Twixt: make your choice
03-26-2008 21:33:33 You have defeated LongDingus
03002: 03-26-2008 21:33:40 [Broadcast]Twixt: phase or die
03004: 03-26-2008 21:33:43 [Broadcast]Twixt: your choice
03-26-2008 21:34:20 Artic Prodigy has defeated Lu Bu.
03-26-2008 21:34:32 Stellar Moon has defeated Mr Invincible
03016: 03-26-2008 21:34:41 [Broadcast]Twixt: whos gonna phase, whos gonna die
03-26-2008 21:34:50 Gen. PinHead has defeated Arachnos Heavy Blaster
03-26-2008 21:35:44 You have defeated Sue Peerior
03031: 03-26-2008 21:35:55 [Broadcast]Twixt: choice number one is phase
03034: 03-26-2008 21:36:00 [Broadcast]Twixt: choice number two is die
Another post:
Well lets just spread the wootness and make all the litta farmers joyhappyjoy.
…Cant do add boy tho, theres a msg size limit i think.
And hoho like all the litta noobies dont rally round the buffs and leave the zone whenever Twixt comes round anyway.
Park the hvy jump to base get moar phase.
Always funny when the farmers come to town.
ps Stasis who? never heard of him.
And another (partial post this time because the original is too long):
So wat they gotA? They got lots a energy. They got farmer persistence. They got their self-supported claims of leet skilz in the arean, where, sez the arean boys, kills are counted for real and everything is “fair.” Well, hoho to that. But at least they got that i guess.
But Twixt wont even go to the arean! Not even when they ask him nice! And not even will he not even go to the arean, lo and behold, he talks back and calls them litta arean boys!
Its like a frgn nightmare.
July 9, 2009 at 7:00 am
(replying here for ease of reading)
From your reply its obvious that we come from different traditions and have perhaps different goals. So, taking one step back I think I will frame my perspective a bit: Coming from a Science and Technology studies background I prefer to think of players and games in terms of users and technology. I often find that when getting too concerned about the “gameness” of designfeatures, game events and player activities – it limits analysis of events that cant be labelled as play, and ignores large part of what constitutes gaming in MMOs.
I think you expressed a similar notion when saying that “And that’s also another reason why social “games” aren’t really games, and, perhaps, also why it is so easy for game designers to push social “games” over real games: because player behavior in social “games” doesnt really matter.”
Where you seem to wish to eliminate the social part cause it is taking away the “gameness”, I simply acknowledge that there are many activites in MMOs that has little do do with “play” or “gameness”. I also dont see that as a negative trait in design, simply a design choice that gives much room to user configuration.
Ofcourse the game aspect cannot be ignored, but in MMOs there is so much happening that cannot be termed as “play” cause it has none of its characteristics (its not enjoyable, it has RL consequences etc.). Gaming (which i try to use instead), or “doing games”, however I see as set of practices, including socializing (guildnetworking), worklike activities (like farming), things outside the game (making machinimas, reading forums), learning a.o. as WELL as actually playing the game (controlling the avatar and engaging enemies/ the set rules of the game).
I understand that you wish to find a definition of griefing that does not rely on player experiences, but I dont see that as possible cause at is core: griefing IS about player experiences. I used the word intent, and realize in hindsight this is a fuzzy word to use. I was trying to direct the focus on the meaning that the practice was given. Since the meaning of the practice of griefing is to disrupt others gameplay, I dont see it as separable from players perception of it. Comparing them to cheating and spoilsport, griefing differs because it is not about the rules or the spirit of the rules, it is about the social rules. The rules that are beeing broken are the social rules, no the hardcoded rules of the game. It is about social aspect of the game, and wanting to breach the social code set up.
The reason I labeled your activities as griefing was because the meaning you gave your practice was to test the disruption PvP gave to other players:
“I decided to further explore this disruption with Twixt.
Specifically, I conducted a series of breaching experiments with Twixt”
All in all from a STS perspective, I read your data as a very good account of how users are inscribing another set of rules into the game technology, a set of moral codes, that through their practices of upholding these (and freezing out those who don’t obey them) becomes an integral part of the game. After all, the game’s current design is based on having those players present. And thus, the players practices and meaning given to these, are also a part of the game. This is again based on a producer/user model where users are co-producing content and technology (from media studies theories such as domestication by Silverstone and Haddon have similar ideas). To study the users reactions, without acknowledging their ruleset as “equal” as to that of the game, is to me contradictory.
July 9, 2009 at 7:25 am
“Twixt, what are you doing?”
“I’m playing football! And I’m winning!”
“You just tackled me! We were playing touch football!”
“Yeah, but the referee-robot says I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Yeah, the ref-bot is programmed with football rules. But none of us like being tackled so we were playing touch football. We told you that already.”
“But this is a football field! You should be playing football!”
“We are playing football. We’re just not tackling.”
“You’re all a bunch of wimps who don’t really wanna play football! But I’m playing football, and I’m winning!”
“But why’d you knock over the guy who was grilling franks in the middle of the field? Or the guys tossing the football back and forth? Or the teenagers making out in the end zone?”
“They were on the football field, and they were wearing a different color jersey! The ref-bot says that’s legal!”
“Yeah, but it’s kind of a dick move…”
“Besides, they shouldn’t even be on the field! They’re getting in the way of the *real* football players!”
“Yeah, uh, you’re the only one who’s playing that game. Nobody’s playing with you, and nobody cares about the touchdowns you’re scoring except the automatic scoreboard.”
“It doesn’t matter! I’m on a FOOTBALL FIELD, PLAYING FOOTBALL, and I’m WINNING!”
Yeah, it may be a shame that nobody else wants to play football on this beautiful football field, but that doesn’t mean that by engaging everyone on the field in football-legal activities, you’re playing football *with them.* For that to happen, they’d have to agree that your play is correct and that the results you’re generating are meaningful, and you demonstrably can’t coerce them into doing so.
July 9, 2009 at 7:30 am
Thank you for that — it is made of awesome.
July 9, 2009 at 9:03 am
Found this “study” via Metafilter.
I’m sorry, but this study is absolute bunk on so many levels. Where do I start?
First, on the face of it, are these supposed to be surprising conclusions? You ruined peoples’ play experience, and you are surprised that you received a negative reaction? What is the finding here, that people don’t like it when you do things that they don’t like?
Second, this is not ethical. People paid money to play this game, and the developers invested time and effort to create it. Your “experiment” was without anyone’s consent, and you basically ruined players’ experiences, not to mention interfered with the developer’s business. It strikes me as unethical to force people to join in your particularly unpleasant experiment.
Third, one of the primary distinctions you make is between ‘game’ rules and informal ‘player’ rules, as though there are two different sets of social rules. However, it makes no sense to treat game rules as “social”. A better analog to the “real world” would be equating game rules with the laws of physics, since they are not determined by the community. Removing this arbitrary distinction leaves us with a tissue-thin set of conclusions that would not be surprising to any halfway intelligent chimp.
Let’s look at how disingenuous you are:
I was not so much shocked by my opponents being angry and as what they were angry about. If we were playing chess, and you got very angry that I moved my bishop — just moved my bishop, thats all — then I would be equally surprised.
Come on, are we expected to believe this? Have you ever PLAYED chess? In the chess community, there are TONS AND TONS of informal socially-enforced rules, such as those against “kibbitzing,” by bystanders, varying standards about whether you can take back moves, etc. Am I expected to believe that you find this “shocking”? You are essentially saying that you are surprised that there is such a thing as unwritten community rules.
What you said here is just ignorant:
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
Clearly, you have no idea what you are talking about. Do you know what’s involved in programming games like these? Striking a balance, implementing a persistent world etc.; these are huge constraints on design. A lot of players LIKE to socialize in-game, so that’s part of the design. Should they leave that market behind to satisfy your idea of good design?
Not to mention the fact that the developers have limited resources to make the gameworld precisely what you want it to be — a fact that you don’t seem to care much about when you’re screwing up their enterprise. The point is to give the players an experience that they enjoy, not implement your notion of their “responsibility.” Yes, those fat cat developers and their pocketbooks…give me a break!
At the end of the day, the biggest problem with your study is that there is absolutely nothing surprising about your conclusions. People don’t like it when you violate informal rules that were intended to make things more enjoyable.
This whole effort strikes me as disingenuous: I believe that you truly enjoy griefing, and playing computer games, and you’re a lazy academic. So YOU abdicated your responsibility to research something that would be useful or interesting to the rest of the community, and instead wrote a paper detailing your antisocial pursuits. Publish or die? Some fates are worse than death!
By the way, in case you’d like to explain away my rant as sour grapes, be aware that I’ve never played CoH, and I find MMO’s to be dreadfully dull as a rule. I just think you’re being a lazy jerk.
July 9, 2009 at 9:34 am
This msg chain is on my site. I keep it as a reference point. You can see the entire thread there — containing both my msgs and the replies I received. It’s been archived on my site for some time.
It was one of the longer and more active msg chains on the Freedom forum at the time, especially after I decided to add my kill logs to it during roughly Feb-Mar 2008, the last two months (of about 14 months) of observations I describe in my paper.
I think this data is very interesting and I used some of it in my paper. It shows, in written/verbal form, the style of attack and approach that Twixt took (more physically and silently for much of his time inside RV) — playful, factual, direct, oppositional.
If the pvp game in CoH had been only of the forum/flame war variety, this would have been Twixt’s only option in a game rules vs. social rules confrontation. This flame warish confrontation between Twixt and his opponents came after his opponents had been using the forums against Twixt for some time — and, of course, they continued to do so after Twixt quit posting in this thread (sometime around March 2008).
The other msg thread of interest, which I dont have archived on my site, is a long msg chain that resulted from revealing my identity to the CoH community in an attempt at a more genial debriefing process. That attempt was met by the same sort of response you see in the gamer forums now: emotional and personal attacks, extremely similar to those Twixt experienced in-game. I manage to discuss some things and answer a few questions about the study in that exchange, but not much unfortunately. You can see that results of that exchange in some of the earlier comments about Twixt posted on this blog. I have left all these comments intact.
July 9, 2009 at 9:39 am
Without trying to question your opinion about me being jerk, let me ask you this?
Is the function of online gaming to teach people how not to be a jerk?
Or, to ask it in another way: Are social pressures leading to conformity of behavior the defining characteristic of online computer game “designs”?
July 9, 2009 at 10:19 am
Or, to ask it in another way: Are social pressures leading to conformity of behavior the defining characteristic of online computer game “designs”?
No, and I don’t understand the point of the question.
All games with communities have informal community rules. You mentioned chess — perfect example. There are many behaviors that, while not in violation of the rules, are considered uncouth or bad sportsmanship, purely in the context of chess. Go out and look it up. This aspect of game playing has nothing to do with whether or not the game is online. Or whether or not we’re talking about a game; every COMMUNITY has rules like this, too.
In addition, your question lacks the context of genre. What game genre? FPS games are less social and more “gamey” than MMO’s. There are many kinds of games.
The “defining characteristic” of games of **ALL** types can be found in the definitions that you presented at the start of this blog thread — namely: competition. Without the GAME part of the game, there is no point in the community existing.
And if you’re trying to imply that games will move away from hard coded rules into purely socially coded rules, then you’re off track. What would that look like? That would look like what we’re using right now i.e. an online forum.
Like I said, some of the distinctions you are making are false. In baseball, we have certain rules that we agree upon. This is purely social convention. The application-enforced rules of videogames are more akin to the laws of physics i.e. the fact that a person can’t hit a baseball into orbit. You can’t “cheat” the laws of physics any more than you can press a button to make your character go up a level.
Everything else is a social convention. This is possibly an interesting distinction between online and offline gaming, but it is not the one you have chosen to discuss.
A final problem with your question is that the question itself implies change (i.e. “leading”). Have any of these things changed? Have MMO games become less formal and more informal over time? Not for the most part. If you’re serious about a question like this, you should be playing EVE online, not griefing on CoH. But the vast majority of online games are not MMO’s, and I see no significant change along this axis.
The more I think about it, the more silly it is that you would play a game from the absolute most social game genre (MMO’s), and yet you are surprised that there are socially-enforced rules. Come on, dude! Pull the other one!
July 9, 2009 at 10:24 am
Everything else is a social convention. This is possibly an interesting distinction between online and offline gaming, but it is not the one you have chosen to discuss.
To elaborate on my own point here: the interesting thing about online games is THE OPPOSITE of what you’re saying. A difference between online and offline games is not that online games have a social component to the ruleset, but rather that they have some game rules which NOT socially-enforced, and are instead part of the “laws of nature.”
July 9, 2009 at 10:25 am
Analogies are tricky, huh?
How bout this one: First time Twixt tackles, pull out gun, shoot Twixt in head.
Barbecue Twixt.
Tackle football disappears from face of Earth.
July 9, 2009 at 10:27 am
Dr. Myers, you keep complaining that people aren’t discussing the gameplay, but they are. Part of the gameplay of an MMO is playing together. And even when people aren’t playing together, they expect to be playing by some rules of honor (especially in a game about superheroes, who are all about honor) – something droning goes completely against. You’re missing the point here. People aren’t upset because you ignored their social circles and killed them, they’re upset because you made it not fun to play the game for them. And “fun” is the whole point of a game (check out “A Theory of Fun” by Raph Koster for more on that idea). No matter how you look at it, you broke the first WRITTEN rule in the CoH Rules of Coduct: “you must respect the rights of others and their rights to play and enjoy the game”. They weren’t being allowed to enjoy the game, thus, their rights weren’t really being respected. I didn’t see them complaining about you killing them so much as how you did it. That is an important distinction.
These are real, flesh-and-blood people. Not faceless avatars. They have feelings and reasons of their own for playing. The fact that they are real people and you weren’t taking into account how your actions might affect them on a human level means that you were not acting ethically in performing this study. I’ve already written a lot about that, so I’m not going to go into it more here, but if you want to know all my reasons you acted unethically, read my blog post about it: http://www.pixiepalace.com/2009/07/07/ethics-in-studying-online-videogames/
You asked for a definition of “griefer” that doesn’t involve intent. I never thought intent had anything to do with it primarily because of the root of the word: “grief”. Grief is what is experienced by the victim, not the perpetrator, thus a “griefer” is someone (a player) who causes grief, or something akin to it, to another player while playing a game. Generally, I think it takes either multiple or severe offenses to earn the moniker. In that sense, you were very much a “griefer”. I hope that makes sense.
July 9, 2009 at 10:36 am
Thanks for the definition of griefing. I am thinking about that one. I can’t go with yours though. Wouldn’t work. Simple demonstration: Your message posting griefs me. Are you now a griefer?
“Part of the gameplay of an MMO is playing together.”
I realize that. I never played or interfered or in any way “griefed” anyone’s together play. I never went into pve areas and clicked all the blinkies in a farm mission, for instance. I stayed in RV and played the game there. The game in RV is a competitive game. In a competitive game, there is another, more fundamental component of cooperative play than the one you seem to reference. Cooperative play in a competitive game is where everyone tries their best to achieve game goals according to the rules of the game, rather than to circumvent, manipulate, and change rules according to their own desires and benefits. For me, the former is fun, and the latter is selfish. Real people can play games, or they can destroy games. I would prefer that they played games.
July 9, 2009 at 10:37 am
Rosepixie, I would say that a griefer is someone who is trying to disrupt others’ play experience and fun. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are grinning like an idiot or just being one. Under that fairly simple definition, there is no question that this was griefing. The only question I have is whether or not there was any genuine scientific curiousity behind the griefing.
Hell, let’s eschew the labels: we can all agree that he was ruining other peoples’ fun, fun that they had paid money for and invested time in. Shameful. I think you explained that very well. This was not ethical.
July 9, 2009 at 10:39 am
Simple demonstration: Your message posting griefs me. Are you now a griefer?
I am becoming increasingly convinced that you are disingenuous. Why all this semantic squabbling over definitions? First of all, you were griefing by anyone else’s definition. Second of all, who cares what we call it? The important thing is that you were wasting other peoples’ time and money, without their consent, ostensibly for research but possibly just for fun.
July 9, 2009 at 10:42 am
The rules of games — real games — specifically set up boundaries between society and game. “Magic circle” sort of thing. If the game rules aren’t protected and sacrosanct (doesn’t mean they can’t evolve and change), then you don’t have a game, you have the pretense of a game. Once rules are determined, as in baseball, it doesn’t matter how they were determined (though social convention or some other means). Once the rules are determined, the rules rule. These can be bad rules, good rules, doesn’t matter. But if game rules are subject to the whims of players, you don’t have a game. You either whimsy or politics. (Of those two, I must confess, I prefer whimsy.)
July 9, 2009 at 10:43 am
For me, the former is fun, and the latter is selfish. Real people can play games, or they can destroy games. I would prefer that they played games.
Since when is it all about you, and what you prefer? It seems like you have a strange resentment against people who have informal rules. I would say your complaint about developers not fulfilling their “responsibilities” reflects this.
Do you talk while a golfer is lining up his shot? Do you kibbitz in a chess game? These are not against the rules, so why not? The only difference here is that online gamers cannot smash you in the face with their nine iron, so you would not dare to do such things IRL.
July 9, 2009 at 10:45 am
A game has a common and universal formal structure. Online, offline doesnt matter. There is a difference between law of nature and rules of games. Rules of games, in a sense, mimic laws of nature, but that mimicry component is vital.
July 9, 2009 at 10:56 am
Professor Myers, in your paper you reference Harold Garfinkel, specifically his “breaching experiments”, and you make reference to ethnometodology. But as I understand, ethnomethodology is about studying the construction of reality by participants. This applies to rules as well; rules are, according to Garfinkel, interactional and situational, and references to rules (in any game) are made, not in a vacuum, but in order to perform social action: that is, to make people accountable, to resolve conflict, and to make sense of other people’s actions (like the way other CoH players have attempted to explain your actions by calling you a griefer, troll, or mentally ill, similar to the way the subjects in Garfinkel’s experiments reacted to their experimenters). But if what you’ve done is study of social action, and the construction of the “mundane” and “ordinary”, then why do you insist on labeling a certain category of rules as objective and intended to govern action? What about the counts-as, ad-hoc nature of rules in social interaction? That was, after all, one of Garfinkel’s most salient points.
To quote Derek Edwards, “the importance of rules-for-human-action to actions themselves is not merely one of governance or of rule-following. It is something that depends on how the actors themselves, as part of their actions, and as part of how they account for their actions, treat rules as relevant. This might involve participants treating rules as constraining, or needing to be followed, or as inapplicable, or optional, or, indeed, there may be some dispute as to what the rule, or the relevant rule, actually is. In fact, the invocatioun of a rule is part of defining what kind of action it was to start with. So all this depends heavily on how things and events are described.”
So why, then, do you describe the “game rules” as set in stone and intended to govern player action, and the “social rules” as opposing these? From where I’m standing, both types of rules are in fact the same thing, just invoked and described in different ways. I think Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks would agree.
July 9, 2009 at 11:05 am
“there are many activites in MMOs that has little do do with “play” or “gameness””
We agree. But there are also many things that do do with play and gameness. My observation is that the things that have little to do with them are in opposition to (and slowly transforming/destroying) the things that do have to do with them. If so, this is an interesting phenomenon, don’t you think? Why should non-play, non-game activities be so actively opposed to true game play activities (as, I humbly submit, Twixt represents)? Shouldn’t the two be separate but equal? According to the Twixt experience, that’s not the case.
At this point, Im not so much interested in user models or theoretical frameworks so much as just getting people to focus on the sort of oppressive social regime that exists in mmos, particularly when that oppression is directed at games and game rules. Twixt gets called a griefer and and ethical transgressor for playing a game — a consensual game with an explicit and obvious set of rules that he abides by to the letter!? Hard to fathom at some level.
Griefing can be defined in reference to the game system rather than the players. Just as cheating and spoilsporting (Huizinga) can. Ill take a shot at that later sometime on my blog.
July 9, 2009 at 11:11 am
We are standing in different places. Game rules, as I try to point out in my blog post, have peculiar and liminal properties that social rules do not. These liminal properties are extremely important to human cognition and development. This is a distinction between game rules and social rules that does not result from their construction or origin but from their FORM. They have different (and importantly different) FORMAL properties.
The Garfinkel reference is a useful (I thought, maybe not as it turns out) metaphor to help understand what is going on inside the Twixt observations. It does tend to turn the discussion more towards a consideration of social rules than game rules, however. And more towards a consideration of social processes rather than rules forms. In both cases, my focus is more on the latter.
July 9, 2009 at 11:13 am
“Since when is it all about you”
Exactly. Excellent. Ask it widely.
July 9, 2009 at 11:16 am
It’s true that the rules must be respected once the game has begun. But until the players agree to abide by the rules, no game is being played. The difference of opinion seems to be whether entering a space where a game can be played is the same as agreeing to abide by that (potential!) game’s rules. See previous analogy.
Incidentally, it’s disingenuous to imply that the reaction to Twixt’s play was analogous to being shot in the head. The players did not have the power to kill you, nor were they successfully able to ban you from the field. Their choices were: to play the game you insisted on, despite their disinterest; to try to carry on with their activities despite your interference, cursing your name all the while; or to leave the field. None of these were particularly satisfying, and none of these were as pleasant to them as the options they had before you arrived.
If the purpose of a game isn’t the enjoyment of the players, what purpose does it serve? Sure, you weren’t as interested in the social variant of the game as you were in the strict variant, but your refusal to compromise left nobody as happy as they could have been, including (if I understand correctly) yourself.
And that’s the aspect of this I truly don’t comprehend.
July 9, 2009 at 11:23 am
I give up. There’s a lot of big words for simple ideas, here. I think the gamer who ascribed Asperger’s-like symptoms to Twixt (i.e. YOU) was on to something. There’s something perverse about the way you are answering these objections, as though you are trolling your own blog.
July 9, 2009 at 11:27 am
“If the purpose of a game isn’t the enjoyment of the players, what purpose does it serve?”
Hmm, wasn’t that the question I asked somewhere else: what is the purpose of a game?
Good question. Fun doesn’t get you there though. Just to start the ball: Whats the difference between fun inside games and outside games?
July 9, 2009 at 11:28 am
My message posting does not make me a griefer simply because it is not in a game. “Griefer” is specifically a game term.
Your paper refutes your claim that you never interfered in anyone’s together play. You state that you broke up groups farming quests together, ruined fight clubs, etc. All of those are examples of cooperative play. Even if they are in the context of a PvP zone, there is more going on in the zone than just the overarching pillbox game you focused on, just as there is more going on in the PvE zones than just killing MOBs.
Nondefective is making an excellent point in that you’re acting disingenuous with all of this focus on definitions and ignoring of the actual issues.
July 9, 2009 at 11:46 am
I’ve been thinking about you saying that my message makes me a griefer because it “griefs” you. I thought at first you were just being flippant, but now I’m not sure. I am assuming that you actually read what I wrote, which stipulated the action took place in a game. “Griefer” is a game term. It hasn’t transcended that context within the language (not to say it won’t at some point, but it hasn’t at this time). Thus, my message isn’t “griefing”. But you are a professor, well educated and, presumably, experienced at reading every word before you in order to find full meaning in a sentence. So why did you skip that part? The fact that was convenient for you to do so in order to be able to dismiss what I said out of hand is the only explanation I can think of. This is not only rude, but dishonest and disrespectful. By and large the comments here on your blog have been well written and respectful in tone, even when they disagreed with you. It is childish and rude for you to respond this way to me and to others who are attempting to have an intelligent conversation about a published academic paper. If you didn’t want a discussion, you shouldn’t have published the Twixt paper.
July 9, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Rosepixie, Im honestly concerned that you believe I am being disrespectful. On the other hand, I know I am not. We all have the right to ask questions, right?
The situation I posed to you (If you bring grief to me, are you a griefer?) seems an important questions. Wouldn’t that be an even more important question to ask *outside* a game than inside?
If we play a game together, both playing by the rules, and you feel harmed, isn’t it important that that happened *inside* the game? Isn’t it more likely, in a game context, that your opponent (for instance, me) DIDNT RLY “intend” to hurt you. (That opponent only intended to play the game.)
Outside the game context, however, wouldn’t the person harming you be more (rather than less) likely to have “intended” to harm you?
It’s a good question, don’t you think?
July 9, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Rosepixie, I think you’re being nicer than he warrants. On the site that referred me to this study (metafilter), at least one user has reported Dr. Myers to Loyola’s IRB, and the response back is that they are looking into it. I sincerely hope that Dr. Myers is properly chastised. Perhaps his next paper can discuss the formal/informal rule dichotomy of the Loyola internal review board.
July 9, 2009 at 12:22 pm
It’s a good question, don’t you think?
I can’t for the life of me figure out what is so illuminating about this line of inquiry. You’re way too hung up on terminology. “Griefer” is merely an “asshole” in a specific context. There’s nothing more to it.
July 9, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’m glad someone is. I have been considering looking into that.
July 9, 2009 at 1:04 pm
The indications I used to determine designer intent were the published rules of the game (online RV description, for instance), the EULA, the software mechanics/code, and the response of the game moderators (what was or wasnt banned).
I want to return to this statement. You state that you determined designer intent based on 3 things:
– the end user license agreement (EULA)
– the software mechanics/code
– response from game moderators
Then you go on to say that other players in the zone were not using the zone according to the “game rules”. Which implies that they either:
– broke the EULA agreement
– manipulated the software mechanics/code
– were stopped by game moderators
Since none of these things actually happened I don’t understand how you determined that “game rules” precluded the activities of your rivals.
July 9, 2009 at 1:08 pm
QQ moar
July 9, 2009 at 1:13 pm
I missed one thing–the published description of the Recluse’s Victory zone. In my haste I was only able to find one official published description. It is reproduced below:
The forces of good and evil will collide in a recursive future as they battle over Recluse’s Victory. Each victory or defeat will bring that reality one step closer to “true time.” It is up to the heroes of Paragon City to defeat Lord Recluse time and time again; making that future evermore real until it finally takes hold and denies all other conclusions. Meanwhile, the villains strive to litter Atlas Park with the broken bodies of their hated foes and secure tomorrow for themselves.
If there is another resource that you are referring to, please feel free to direct me to it.
July 9, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Listen, folks, we just don’t get it because we’re not trained sociologists. Even though everyone is telling Dr. Myers that he was out of line, and his research conclusions state the obvious… that’s just proof that the unwashed masses just don’t understand the complexities of his field. You see, you need to have a thorough education in sociology to find something surprising about this. If you just understood the terminology, then this entire study would shock you to your core!
July 10, 2009 at 6:13 am
“Most surprisingly of all (maybe only to me), game designers themselves seem no longer interested in their rules. They seem to focus increasingly less on game rules and increasingly more on game rulers. Rulers don’t like the game rules? No problem. Eliminate those rules.”
Am I to assume you say this as a result of players not PvPing in a PvP area (as your entire paper rests on)?
Lets come at it from another angle – Did the players, by not actively PvPing, breach any rules?
If not, then this study is worthless, and this is what you fail to understand.
If there is a rule, saying the Heroes must fight the villains (and vice versa) in this area, you still went the wrong way about upholding those rules, and that too makes the study worthless.
Take the fact that not only did you actively kill avatars, but you gloated about killing them – you skew your own results, actively making players ‘hate’ you.
Your study reveals one thing, that was not surprising, revalutionary, or even news – Griefing (where griefing is disrupting other players’ enjoyment) players and gloating only leads to hatefilled responses.
“Likewise, when social rules substitute for or replace game rules, they do so at the expensive of the game’s liminal properties. 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.”
Then you fail to understand what MMORPGs are. MMORPGs are both games and societies, much like any multiplayer online game. Players form, and fall into, social groups where they know other players.
Taking EVE online – there are some very well known players that will ‘help’ anyone, there are known PvPers; Pirates, vigilantes; and known PvEers, miners, manufacturers, etc.
All within game rules, and there are economic, social and political rules as well. Much like CoX, it has two ’sides’, any many social groups take avatars from both sides, which according to you, is game-breaking, yet according to actual critics, the players and developers, makes the game better than the ruleset alone could.
Simply – the community (and the social rules this creates) adds to the game. You went against this, attempting to tear down the social rules, pretend the community does not matter and as a result, got the community’s negative response.
“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.”
Just further reinforces that you do not understand the MMORPGs at all. You are a sociologist that fails to see the social requirement of the games. Guild Wars is a great example where the ’social rules’ match the ‘game rules’, yet even so, not everyone plays exactly as the developers intended.
I would suggest you find free trials for WoW, SW:G and Guild Wars in particular, and if you don’t want skewed results this time, remember not to gloat about killing avatars.
July 10, 2009 at 1:07 pm
As someone familiar with standard human subject guidelines, I can tell you that dmyers’ research violated accepted ethical standards. These standards, unlike the “game rules” dmyers is being pedantic about, are very well codified by human subject review boards.
If you are a player or researcher who is concerned with the ethical conduct of his research, you should contact the IRB at Loyola University to express your concerns: http://www.loyno.edu/ogr/humansubjects.html
As per IRB rules, each individual complaint has to be documented and is taken very seriously as local IRBs have federal government oversight. The number of individual complaints will say a great deal about the severity of the ethical misconduct.
Given the pedantic nature of scholarly discourse, your time and energy may be better spent by lodging a formal complaint directly with Loyola’s IRB.
July 12, 2009 at 7:44 am
Mr. Myers you have no idea what your talking about concerning the social dynamics involved in online gaming. You should try logging a few years before you makes any observations, online communities are not something one can just jump into and learn all there is to know about them, they are complex and evolving social networks that are global.
I am sure you’ve gotten no shortage of derogatory comments concerning this issue, however what I have come to realize in the 20+ years I have been gaming is that there are a great many personalities in the virtual spaces I have spent time in, and so cannot be categorized or cataloged.
These personalities all exhibit a single unifying commonality, that of their humanistic tendencies to displace themselves from the reality of the situation and view issues from a skewed perspective whereby the individual is removed from the repercussions of his actions.
The truth is people are all flawed to some degree, and when your observing them through a crystal ball those flaws become magnified, because all you can see is limited by what your allowed to see. The censorship is carried out by so many filters, some of which you cannot even comprehend. Not counting the technological filters involved such as your pc and the bandwidth you have, you also have those limits the game itself imposes as well as our own physiological defense mechanisms and what we allow you to see.
There is so much depth to a gaming community you could never write a paper on it, or study it fully. Because regardless of our humanistic flaws, and the fragility of our ever changing and dynamic personalities, we have become one with the machine, and we can be whatever we want, whenever we want it.
Any childish lashing out you or anyone like you does in a effort to “understand” only serves to show your unwillingness to admit your own flaws, so look in the mirror and understand that your studying yourself as much if not more then anyone else. When your darkest deepest thoughts come to the forefront, and you twist the truth to maintain your composure, or avoid it to retain a semblance of dignity your perpetuating a falsehood about online gaming to support your own conclusions.
Any study of a environment should be done so as not to disrupt or influence that environment. You contaminate the purity of the subject matter and any neutrality on your part is seen in a destabilizing light, a negative impact on those you mean to study.
July 14, 2009 at 7:12 am
“Any study of a environment should be done so as not to disrupt or influence that environment.”
My play was disruptive of the environment only insofar as the game designers must have planned it to be so. When you question my knowledge and understanding of the situation, would you then question theirs as well?
Much of the tension described in the study can be interpreted as motivated by a desire to wrestle control of the game from the designers who designed it and the players who played it. This means, in effect, destroying the game. While there may be many different and complex personalities and methods working to this end, that tendency — to assert control and destroy the game — seems worthy of generalization.
Also, if my interpretation of the matter is correct, what other means is there to discover it? Online societies are so tightly knit and insular that research concerning online societies is, in many cases, co-opted. Researchers are forced to adopt the assumptions of the MMO and/or culture that they wish to investigate prior to gaining access to that MMO/culture, resulting in a steady stream of the positive and supportive.
IF there is something worrisome going in inside the RV “culture” that is reflective of larger issues in MMOs and in gaming, then how can we access that culture without being seduced by it? I suggest that games and play are activities and processes that have always been, in some real and important sense, subversive. This is most likely why these games and play — free and individual play — are so tightly controlled and so harshly criticized (as Twixt’s play was criticized) by prevailing cultures. That is, games and play are threatening.