When gaming communities go wrong
The more time I spend looking at video games--especially online games and MMPORGs--the more and more strange information that comes out. As with any society, norms and oddities appear as individuals assert their place.
There's a fascinating (and somewhat terrifying) article about Loyola University media professor David Myers "unwelcome" behavior in the game City of Heroes, where he created a character that everyone hated.
Players tried everything they could to get rid of the pariah, but he kept at, apparently as research, but there had to be hint of satisfaction in his role as the most hated player--probably right until someone threatened to kill him for real.
Myers revealed his identity and his character's purpose in "Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt," an academic paper on his experiment published in 2008.
If we assume that games are their own communities and have some level of self-policing (just like open source projects) we can also assume that these things iron themselves out. In this case the community turned completely against the individual and game-maker NCSoft had to step in to moderate a bit.
This all led me to ask: does everything needs a community?
The short answer is it depends. (Note: I'd like to thank business school for that pearl of wisdom that gets you out of answering any question.)
These days every company, project, website, circus clown, and dog websites have community-oriented features that are supposed to facilitate some deeper level of interaction. While some communities thrive, others plateau and become something less than the sponsor wants it to be. That's clearly the case with the City of Heroes example above.
The onus to provide unique, beneficial features and functions falls both on the community sponsor and the users.
Users bring a wealth of materials to communities, but the infrastructure and the impetus to participate has to come from the source. Companies also have to be responsible for what goes on their communities if they want expect the group to be self-governing.
Community also takes on very different connotations when relating to online gaming versus software. In software we rarely kill each other repeatedly. Once tends to be enough.
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Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
I don't know how you call our government schools / teachers union job mills an "educational system". They do about as well as the post office, the DMV, and Amtrak.
You can choose whether or not to engage in PVP, and people like this is why I rarely do. There can be some fun in the cat and mouse chase through the zone (and never quite knowing if you're the cat or the mouse), the interplay between powers. But then there are the "cheap" tactics like this guy used, no skill. Add to that trash talking and taunting and insults, and well, it doesn't take much to sour a lot of people on the fun.
Oh, and the "port to NPC"--while it's changed recently, that used to be flat out griefing. If you're defeated by a player character, the only penalty is the sense of losing the battle. If you're defeated by in-game characters (NPCs), you get debt which reduces your rewards as you progress in the game. That's been changed in PVP zones, but from what he says, he was doing that while it happened.
Yes, there are unspoken rules in any community. Most of the people are in the game to play, have fun, try their skill, and live out their fantasies as a SuperHero or a SuperVillain. So someone is in the game to taunt, insult, trash talk, and interfere in other people's fun...and it's the gaming community that's gone wrong?
tl;dr
THIS JUST IN! ETIQUETTE ISN'T JUST OFFLINE! hmm we need a catchy name for it. world wide webiquette? maybe...
A link to the thread about this on the CoH/CoV forum board.
The short answer is it depends."
Erm, the short answer would be "No." See, if it depends, then logically that means NOT everything needs a community.
We have a communications professor who claims that for some sort of social research, he decided to interact in a way he knew would be frowned upon by players of a massive multiplayer online gaming community. He has no actual published data logs outlining the extend of his 'experimenting', no real journal/diary outlining exactly how he behaved and when he behaved, against whom- just a lot of anecdotes about how horribly he was treated by *some* players in a community.
He doesn't talk all that much about how horribly he treated other players to get such reactions, he makes it sound completely innocuous, saying that he was 'just following the game design' when in fact, I have, in my many years of playing City of Heroes, never seen people just standing around socializing in a Player vs. Player zone. He has no recorded evidence of what he says happened, and many comments on many forums and sites have again and again said that they have no idea what he is talking about- because in PVP zones, people do in fact fight. All the time. With differing degrees of tactics and fairness.
He has no recorded information that says the developers of the game approved of how he used the NPC 'robot army' of drones that could one-shot kill other players' characters and give them real, in game setbacks. On the other hand, if one searches around on forums or reads the License Agreement you need to agree to to play City of Heroes, you find that what he describes doing sounds like 'griefing' which is in fact, THOROUGHLY frowned upon by the game developers. He exploited how a zone happened to be set up, using the drones that were meant to prevent unfair play (attacking players who were emerging from the hospital after a previous defeat) in order to.. unfairly defeat other players.
Other reports from those who played where he did entail how he would verbally harrass and abuse those he unfairly killed, and how he would do this repeatedly.
Are death threats ever a good response? No. And in fact, there are people in this "Bad" gaming community who have expressed sadness and outrage about how some people within their community respond with things like that. But no one seems interested in documenting THOSE people, not the Professor, the previous reporter, or this article.
There is no data on how often he 'cheated' to kill other players before they got to threatening stages. Not even a text log that I've seen, and in fact, with City of Heroes you can record actual in game video fairly easily, so he could, if he wanted, have compiled a huge file of videos showing unfair treatment.
Instead he just says he feels he was treated unfairly, and that this is obvious a sign that 'societal groups' are bad news.
I am one of those players who things death threats are way out of line, ANYWHERE, ANY TIME. But sadly, there are hotheaded people who say things they don't really mean, who make personal threats, and those people are *everywhere*. It is not limited to online interactions, you can hear threats of violence at rowdy bars, at concerts, at sports games.
His shocking breakthrough paper shows absolutely nothing new, it shows that a minority of people reacted to extremes when he ruined their fun in a game that they play for fun. And yes, a minority. He played on one server, he did all this just in the PvP zone there, where only a small percentage of people on even that one server would ever be at any given time. And if anyone has played online games like City for a while, they soon realize that a lot of the more hotheaded, antisocial people play in those zones. In fact, some of those people did, or are, as this is coming to light, 'accepting Professor Myers into their tribe'.
He has not talked about people who might have, who probably did, tell him less vehemently to stop what he was doing. He has not talked about any other side of the community- and if he spent over a YEAR offending other players, why is it shocking that he was shunned by a larger group of the community than even those who did rail at him with threats and slander?
For that matter, one person can have multiple characters in a game like City, and he doesn't have any data to show whether or not in a case of fifteen threats against him, it was fifteen distinct people, or just one person who happens to run into him a lot on different characters.
His 'research' was unscientific, and biased from the start, weighted to put the most appeal into his corner. He went into a situation where there are hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds, who in general have found ways to cooperate and have fun *together*. He then set out to do things that to them are harrassment, and ruin their enjoyment of the game. He apparently expects that these people will 'see the light' and... what? Stop cooperating at all, and everyone just be a cut-throat competitor?
This is not a first person shooter, or a single player platform game. This is a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, and 'community' which you question the need for, is a major aspect of the very game development, not just something spawned to one side of it. It is a game where most of the content is overcome by players banding together, whether randomly, or with set groups of friends. It is a way for people to 'hang out' with relatives or friends who were left behind in cross country moves, and where even actual relationships have grown and bloomed from mere seeds.
What he did was not part of how the game 'was meant to be played'. City of Heroes is a reward-heavy game... when you run arcs or PvP like the development team wanted you to, you get rewards for it- influence, accolades, badges... The 'method' the Professor used as Twixt to kill other players netted him NO reward, which would make me suggest that... it wasn't actually an intended way to kill other players.
There are no stories from Twixt about how he got to the right level to go into PvP zones and teleport foes into drones that I've seen widely looked at, which means either: a)he played every single level to get to that point solo by choice and did not interact with anyone else for some strange reason in a *social* game, or b) He did have help, and good groups, but then when he deliberately began to act 'like an outsider'... which is his parlance for insulting other players and playing in an unfair and uncompetitive way... he began to indeed be shunned by the player community at large.
- by bakafox July 8, 2009 7:31 PM PDT
- That this is surprising or shocking, or disheartening in any way is puzzling to me. We all know that a large group of people has many 'types' in it. There are antisocial types, and folks who think nothing of terrible threats when in a short temper. When you walk into a group made up of over 100 thousand different human beings, you will find that small percentage who are not behaving in ways that the other percentages find acceptable. What also becomes unacceptable then is painting the other many-thousand people as being *the same*. Which seems to be what's going on here.
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(19 Comments)What's extra puzzling is how it's shocking that behaving JUST LIKE some of those other inappropriate people, repeatedly, for long periods of time makes you, in fact, just... well.. another one of those people. Not a researcher, not a martyr, not a victim. Professor Meyers may have stopped being a 'jerk' before he reached a scale of real-life death threats, but that does not actually excuse the fact that he behaved in a way he knew other people would take badly.
Or, if he honestly did not REALIZE that he was repeatedly ruining a form of entertainment for people just trying to have fun for a few hours, people of all ages, creeds, genders, colors, and even nationalities, then I would suggest that the professor needs some actual psychological help, because being that oblivious to what you are doing to other people yourself, while being super sensitive to people who are stepping over your own personal boundaries is a serious disorder/problem.
I am sorry, but the 'gaming community' as a whole has not "gone wrong". A vicious minority of a GENERIC community was... slightly less viciously, but still hardly innocently... provoked, and a predictable reaction ensued.
I am somewhat sorry for the professor, but I am sorrier I think for the more reasonable gamers he's trying to tar and feather, people who may have lost large amounts of their 'fun recreation time' to his insults and repeated griefing, and people who believe that what he did truly entails a societal study.