ESTUDO - Play and Punishment

Media professor David Myers, from Loyola University, has been studying how people interact in online games. Of interest to us is his account of what happened when he started trolling people.

Myers has been studying human interaction in City of Heroes since it first launched all the way back in 2004, and with his character "Twixt" decided as part of his studies to push people's buttons. See how they responded.

Sticking strictly within the game's rules, Myers nevertheless quickly set about making himself unpopular by...doing what the game advertising itself as allowing people to do: create a superhero and battle other superheroes.

See, many players in CoH simply liked hanging out, and teaming up with each other to take down AI opponents. But Myers sought out player vs player action, and began hunting down "villains". He'd fight them, he'd beat them. And because he was good at what he did, he soon built up an impressive list of enemies.

This is where things got nasty; while initially he was gently warned against rampant player-killing, warnings soon blossomed into threats, with Myers sent messages like "I hope your mother gets cancer." Charming. The abuse eventually became so intense - he was accused of being a paedophile and of being a racist - that people were directly threatening Myers and his family, leading him to report them to publishers NCSoft.

Myers went on to publish his account in his study "Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt", which was released last year.

His findings? That it wasn't the game rules that mattered in CoH, it was the hardcore community who sought to preserve their niche little "culture". "If you aren't a member of the tribe, you get whacked with a stick," he said. "I look at social groups with dismay."


Download do Estudo em Documento Word: http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/Myers_PlayPunishment_031508.doc


Fonte: Kotaku.com

Playing by the Rules Won't Make You Friends Online






By Reggie Carolipio in EVE Online, City of Heroes on

Jul 7, 2009


















Editor's Note:
If you think Xbox Live hooligans are rough, you should read this
fascinating piece from Reggie Carolipio about how one professor decided
to play by one online game's rules...and got slapped by the game's
community for doing so. -Jason







According to this New Orleans Times-Picayune article from Nola.com, Loyola University media professor David Myers took it upon himself to run a social experiment over a couple of years in City of Heroes/City of Villains
to discover and document what would happen if he played by the rules as
the designers had intended and not by the customs and taboos accepted
among its player population. Twixt, his heroic avatar in the game, was
a well-established character by the time Myers decided to embark on
this quest.
See, Myers actually plays video games and is one of the first
university-level professors to examine games from an academic
perspective. That's right -- he plays and condenses what he learns into
papers that his peers read and evaluate on an academic level. Instead
of simply nodding at a piece of negativity that we might hear on Xbox
Live, people like Myers are trying to find out why that's the case and
how games have affected us on the social level (among other things).
As much as your opinion or mine are treated as nothing to be
surprised about when we use the mute button on Live, lending a kind of
scholarly legitimacy to this is something of a vindication. The proof
has always been out there, but to see it being taken as seriously as
this is an encouraging, if not surprising, indication that our favorite
pastime is maturing in other ways outside of the ESRB label.
And as you can already guess, it's not pretty.
Myers
decided to go all-in as a hero and document what happened next. That
meant teleporting villainous players into the sights of robot firing
squads and watching them quickly die. This is all completely within the
rules, too, as set down by the game's designers. Villains and heroes
should be at each others' throats...at least that was what was supposed
to happen.
Instead, what Myers discovered was that both sides would commiserate
as opposed to fight and occasionally cooperate to take down particular
foes -- as in Lex Luthor and Superman working toward a common good with
no ulterior motives whatsoever. This isn't quite what the rules had set
out to encourage, but among the players, it was an accepted norm.


Heroes. Villains. And one role-playing professor.
In playing through my own share of MMOs, I've noticed that on those
that do not offer explicit PVP (player vs. player) combat, there's
always a sense of camaraderie among characters that normally shouldn't
hang out together. Dwarves and elves, Alliance and Horde, machine
agents and awakened humans, and dogs and cats living together...I think
we can all agree that other "real world" considerations usually
take precedence over the so-called "rules" of any particular game. But
I've also seen in other games how rampant PVP can turn particularly
powerful characters into remote-controlled bottom feeders by camping
newbie towns.
However, it's not all heartache and hate. In a case of where user-driven conflict actually works, EVE Online's
storied history of corporate betrayals, bank heists in the billions,
and galactic war are all the more impressive considering that each of
these were not scripted into the game by the designers but were
instigated by those like you or me. That corporate insider that had
just betrayed one of the largest, and oldest, alliances of players in
the game to SomethingAwful's GoonSwarm? Completely by the rules. If you
want the details, GoonSwarm spymaster The Mittani lays it all out. You can bet that not a lot of people were very happy about this, either. But that's how the game is played.
The GoonSwarm did exactly what the rules of the game had demanded in
much the same way that Myers' Twixt had done within COH...they both
simply played the game, for good or ill, and went in knowing that is
what they were allowed to do by the rules without regard to what was
socially acceptable. In GoonSwarm's case, and as their reputation is
known by, they weren't concerned so much about creating an empire as it
in simply going out and having a good time as a group. And if it meant
that one of their biggest enemies had to go down as a result, then it
was going to be as fun as they could make it. And they did it as a
team, which is more than I could say for what had happened with Twixt.


All of these ships will probably backstab you later.
Even the early first-person-shooter titles would have their own
share of self-obsessed pranksters who would practice their antisocial
tricks before graduating into the more sophisticated toolsets offered
by MMORPGs. Allied soldiers storming the beaches in Return to Castle Wolfenstein
might find themselves turned into char-grilled chumps thanks to
friendly fire from a flamethrower. On servers that turned off friendly
fire to avoid such "accidents," griefers (as such players would be
called) would find new ways to mess with the game...such as blocking
doorways.
I remember one session when, on the German side, everyone was
gathered together waiting for the Allies until we saw the chat messages
of what was going on. The other side was actually asking for our help
in getting them out because a player was blocking the exit from their
spawn point. We obliged with a Panzerfaust to the bunker, but the
griefer would always return. Interestingly, gaining control of another
spawn point would mean more than a tactical necessity for the other
side because of this.
When Twixt crossed those invisible boundaries and violated the
unspoken code of cooperation within City of Heroes and began
roleplaying, he soon became an outcast...even from his own clan, which
had subsequently kicked him out. He was soon regarded as someone that
was "spoiling the game," almost putting him in the same category as
that guy that blocked in his own team in RTCW.
Before you start thinking that these are kids behind the keyboard
with anger issues (or adults with the mental capacity of 12 year olds),
Myers discovered that the demographics for the game aren't consistent
with what people might think of rage quitters (people that quit because
they are so angry at a game that they just leave...in a rage) as
unemployed pizza eaters dwelling in a dingy apartment block somewhere.
From Myers' research, most of those that played City of Heroes were
employed, technically savvy, mature young adults, with only a tiny
percentage (2 percent) unemployed. He even mentions that the skills
learned within an MMO such as COH could be parlayed into, say, the same
drive that creates corporate CEOs. But stick them behind a monitor and
give them the anonymity of the Internet and he discovered that labels
hardly matter.
Death threats, insults, and watching his fellow heroes simply stand
back while villains ganged up on him to drive Twixt from the game were
only a few of the things that he discovered. Playing by the rules of
the game was apparently not as important as in playing by the social
rules of its players. Here's a passage from his paper, which you can
download at this link from the original article:
"Eventually, because of the recalcitrance of Twixt's opponents,
it became increasingly difficult to interpret embedded player social
rules, orders, and behaviors within RV as anything other than a means
of repressing individual play and players such as Twixt. From Twixt's
point of view, playing by the rules of the game, winning the RV zone
competitions, only increased the obstacles he faced and the insults he
received. In fact, after Twixt had become sufficiently well known, the
consensual goal within RV was, for extended periods of play, simply to
'kill' Twixt."
RV stands for "Recluse's Victory," the highest level of the four PVP (player vs. player) zones within the game.
It wasn't all negative, however, and a few people did consider
Twixt's play within the context of the game in a positive light. But
the overwhelming negativity that "playing by the rules" had engendered
was surprising even to Myers. It's an interesting read. It's not
something that we, as players, haven't heard before, but to see it
broken down in an academic study is kind of fascinating.
As games become more complex and as virtual social tools become more
ubiquitous, it will become more interesting to review just how this all
had come about...and where the burdens of reality and the unfettered
joys of virtual escapism, along with in how we treat each other online,
will take us next.
But don't ever, for the love of Kratos, take away my mute/ignore button.
http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/Playing-by-the-rules-wont-make-you-friends-online.html