By Kieron Gillen on July 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm.
The Sunday Papers surprises me. Sometimes it can be Thursday and my document is nearly empty. I think it’s going to be a small one. And then, Sunday hits, and I’ve all the writing in the world. So, as is Sunday’s wont, I compile a particularly bumper selection of the fine games writing across the week, while trying not to link to some pop-band who’ve managed to surprise me totally in the same period.
- Loyola Professor David Myers has been playing City of Heroes as part of his research. Which strikes me as a good thing to do. However, he’s been playing his Alt Twixt as… well, only obeying the rules of the game rather than the social rules. This lead to becoming one of the most hated players and recieving death-threats. He’s written a paper on it, and a book is forthcoming, but this article has an over-view of the events plus a link to one of his papers. Myers comes across somewhat naive, frankly. Gaming social groups act like social groups? Yeah, so what? And why shouldn’t they. Myers, from their perspective, was acting like a sociopath with no interest in societal mores.
- The Civony ads are quite the thing. Jeff Atwood has been tracking them. This is hilarious.
- We wrote a little about running Far Cry 2 in an Iron Man mode and writing about it last issue. Creative Director Clint Hocking talks about how the permadeath playthroughs of Far Cry 2 started at their end, and the devices they were trying to work into the game to encourage it. Trying to make players cry, basically, via ludic rather than narrative techniques. As always, great to see Clint show his working.
- The second part of Resolution Magazine’s look at how Real World Security Issues in games.
- Meanwhile, Mr Denby goes and drinks from the Eurogamer Money Fountain while writing about flawed-classic Vampire: Bloodlines.
- The oft-splendid console-journo Andrew Kelly has the haircut and (er) posture of a posturing indie-kid haircut. But no! He’s got a dark and geeky past. ONE OF US! ONE OF US! Here’s him on Full Throttle.
- Ars Technica on why they think no-LAN play for Starcraft 2 is a total betrayal.
- Rab Consolevania on his own personal black obelisk. That is, the Fighting Fantasy game books. I could have easily included these in my own Gaming Made Me piece.
- Kirsten at Ready Up continues her Five Lessons in Games Journalism series, with an interview with Jeff Gerstman on writing about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the bloody truth.
- Game Set Watch’s Gaming Anthropologist column caught my eye, in examining the Battlefield Heroes’ community. Paraphrasing somewhat cruelly, it’s free so it’s full of ‘tards. There’s something about this sort of attitude which always rubs me up the wrong way, which I may have to examine eventually. When the most articulate gaming communities I’ve ever been involved in have been purely free ones, putting it down to “you get what you pay for” is flawed.
- Jim Rossignol writing about the beauty of a magazine-layout and transfering it to the modern age. If we had the money and the time, I suspect we’d do things like this. Hmm. I like the contradiction between this entry and the last.
- Steve Peacock on being hype-o-phobic. Love the John Malkovitch/Molyneux mash-up photo.
- Digital Gigolo interviews Leigh Alexander. I’m linking this primarily as a cursory lesson to any would be games journalist in the room. Do not ask your subject to marry you in the first question. You have to manfully resist, as I do whenever I interview Spector. Part of the job is being professional. Part of the job is not proposing.
- I like this. Steven Peeler of Depths of Peril fame goes to the community, asking for what Dungeon Crawl games they’d like to make. A perfect chance to play back-seat designer.
- Here’s some non-game reading for you. Tom Ewing talks about the concept of Poptimism, but segues onto the idea of the charts as a public space – and, I link back to gaming, by thinking how important it is to have generalist sites like (well) us. The more someone disappears into one genre, the more they disappear. The ever-articulate comics/politics blogger – and there’s a powergamed dual-class for you – Sarah Jaffe writes about the Philadelphia Pool Racism scandal, and why it doesn’t surprise. And the Washington Post on the sorry cases of people forgetting about their kids and leaving them in their car. It does nothing but provoke strong emotions. I suspect were I a parent, it’d be more so, one way or another.
- Okay, like many others, I kicked the Horrors’ first album. I found myself giving the second one a chance. And fucking hell – it’s incredible. First single was the album’s closing track, which is an incredibly suicidal and a bit Suicide-al when the synths arrive, a simmering piece of atmosphere: Sea Within A Sea. Second single, Who Can Say is curter and more ferocious with a genuinely great monologue dropped in the middle. The whole album’s on spotify.
Failed.
12/07/2009 at 13:27 lumpi says:
Now those Civony are the funniest thing I’ve seen on the internet in weeks. ROFL!
12/07/2009 at 13:29 nine says:
Stop linking to spotify and feeling superior. Give us youtube links that work.
12/07/2009 at 13:44 SirKicksalot says:
Some comments on the City of Heroes show that the professor actually was a douchebag and was exploiting the game instead of playing by the PvP rules.
He wasn’t skillfully defeating his enemies – he was using a loophole (the instakill drones that prevent spawn-camping) that also has negative effect on the defeated character’s progression.
He was using the game’s mechanics, not the game’s rules. There’s a difference…
12/07/2009 at 13:45 TonyB says:
That’s Fighting Fantasy Kieron. I can’t imagine Final Fantasy books having quite the same impact, since rather than having the fights built into the story you’d just have to regularly jump to the battle pages mid-sentence then return to where you left off afterwards.
12/07/2009 at 13:51 Allandaros says:
“Fighting Fantasy,” not “Final Fantasy.”
12/07/2009 at 14:08 Thomas says:
Shoegaze if definitely one of my favourite genres, i’m glad that people still make good shoegaze.
12/07/2009 at 14:10 Justin Keverne says:
Guy from The Horrors sound like Morrissey, no wonder Kieron likes them ;)
12/07/2009 at 14:11 jalf says:
Which is exactly what Kieron said. The “games rules” are partly social. He ignored those. The game mechanics are the only “rules” enforced by the game, and those he obeyed. If the game allows a loophole or an exploit, the only reasons not to use it are social.
12/07/2009 at 14:17 frymaster says:
exploiting the game instead of playing by the PvP rules
from the CoH forums PvP FAQ:
“TPing people into holes in the geometry in PvP zones is a petitionable offense, as is the use of language that breaks the EULA, but other than that, everything goes in a PvP zone”
He was notorious enough that the admins would have banned him if he’d broken any of the actual non-game-engine-enforced (i.e. non-game-mechanic) rules. That he wasn’t banned leads me to believe he was playing within the rules. He was just playing outside what the player base has spontaneously decided is “acceptable behaviour”
12/07/2009 at 14:18 SirKicksalot says:
Indeed, but the way that article is worded and the things the professor say make it seem like he was a fair, skilled gentleman and the other players were dumbasses that didn’t play by the rules.
It’s like he completely missed the point. Like that lady that was forced to sleep a night in a campus because of bad management. She then wrote a book about how the four students used their computers a few hours without saying a word that night, thus proving the alienation and social problems created by the computers.
Disregarding the fact that the students might have been just polite, because they thought she was sleeping.
12/07/2009 at 14:19 Sunjumper says:
I just read the paper by professor David Myers and I have to say that I am rather surprised by his lack of understanding of human behaviour and motivation, one would think that professor of sociology would have some understanding about human psychology and maybe also the limitation of games.
His paper is actually rather poor as his results are not supported by any kind of evidence. He just follows down his own fallacious train of thought coming to the conclusion that the real ‘natural laws’ (what does he mean by that anyway?) are impossible to find with anything but aberrant behaviour.
There is an especially surprising passage where the author himself is shocked when he is expulsed from his own clan after continuous griefing and then being thrown out after killing one of his clan mates. Hinting that the author himself might be a sociopath, there is a difference between professional detachment for the sake of an experiment and the apparent inability to grasp the social concepts that are allegedly being researched.
12/07/2009 at 14:23 skalpadda says:
I’m amazed at the City of Heroes story. It would seem like common sense that if you’re repeatedly ruining other people’s fun and don’t respect it when they ask you to stop doing so, it shouldn’t come like a big surprise that they won’t like you and that some lack the patience/brains/vocabulary to express their dislike in a civil manner.
Stupidity.
12/07/2009 at 14:34 jalf says:
@SirKicksalot: Yeah, no doubt he acted like a prick, and it’s hardly surprising he became unpopular. I wasn’t defending him in any way. And his inability to understand why is really baffling.
12/07/2009 at 14:41 Ging says:
I loved the fighting fantasy series back in the day and have retained a couple of the earlier books for sentimentality reasons.
I am vaguely looking forward to the DS release of the warlock of firetop mountain – though it’s taken more of an action rpg turn.
12/07/2009 at 14:42 JKjoker says:
no adding LAN in Starcraft 2 is more than just a betrayal, im a bit disappointed it hasnt caused as much smoke as Spore DRM or L4D2 (which shows in Ars Technica’s poll), but i guess the real bitching is going to come once the game is out and ppl try to play with their friends and realize what no LAN means.
also, about the poll, 50% of “we trust Blizzard, lets see the final product”? sigh, i would have thought gamers developed a healthy level of skepticism by now but they seem to be still blinded by bling-mapping
12/07/2009 at 14:43 Herpers says:
Haha, there is another evony ad right next to the comment box, someone should do a gaming diary about it, where they count how many digital breasts they actually see in the game.
12/07/2009 at 14:45 Rabbitsoup says:
the City of Heroes thing if you read it he only mentions a few people being annoyed that’s it. Seems to me he is making a mountain out of a molehill (and is an ass).
Really when video games is growing our first academics are borderline exploiters who moan about it?
12/07/2009 at 14:48 MrBejeebus says:
Sure what Myers did was interesting, but it ruined many peoples fun, fun they paid for…
Also that Evony stuff is ridiculous, i actually stay away from free to play games, i just don’t see how that last picture has anything to do with the game
12/07/2009 at 14:50 JKjoker says:
uh, i was looking though Ars Technica and i saw and article from July 10 that Alan Wake might either no come for PC at all or come much later like Gears of war 1 did, sigh, seems Vista only and cutting down the non action parts of the game wasnt enough for MS
12/07/2009 at 14:58 Stupid Fat Hobbit says:
Professor Myers’s ‘experiment’ is essentially the equivalent of someone going on a real-life killing spree, then objecting to being arrested on the grounds that they didn’t break the laws of physics.
12/07/2009 at 15:03 Anon says:
@Stupid Fat Hobbit
Except he wasn’t arrested. It’s more like that South Park episode.
12/07/2009 at 15:18 DMJ says:
@Herpers: To do that, someone would have to click on those ads to sign up to play the game. I started at “uninterested” and my interest level has plummeted as they have resorted to more and more desperate tactics to get me to click.
Right now, clicking that ad means “I’ll click anything for boobs!”, and my self-respect PREVENTS me from doing so.
12/07/2009 at 15:37 drewski says:
Surely if you don’t want to participate in Villans v Heros PvP, because it’ll ruin the fun you’re paying for, you should stay off PvP servers?
I see no problem with what the professor was doing – he played by the rules, obeyed the spirit of the game regardless of popular convention. That he was treated like crap isn’t surprising, because gamers hate anything they’re not doing themselves.
If I was playing CoH/CoV I’d probably do the same thing if I were powerful enough, except I’d be a villain in kill heroes. It’s a PvP concept, complaining when people PvP on a PvP server is incredibly infantile.
12/07/2009 at 15:38 mandrill says:
The professor’s experiment seemed to me to be a look at what would happen if we, in our daily lives in the real world, only obeyed the laws of physics (the ‘mechanics’ if you will) and ignored all the ‘imaginary’ rules created to facilitate social interactions and the like.
It turn out that if you do that you are shunned, treated like a pariah, and excluded from society. It just goes to show that the ‘mechanics’ are not the be all and end all of online games. No matter how hard developers try to engineer societal rules into their game there will be unwritten rules about social behaviour in the game universe which will emerge organically from the fact that there are large numbers of people interacting.
What he did was act like an ass, so he got treated like one. He broke the social rules whilst staying within the physical laws of the game. Proof positive that society within online games isn’t that different from society in the real world. Did he get a research grant for this? If he did I bet those that provided it are thinking “We gave a guy money to play a game and act like a total douch while doing so, all to tell us something that is common sense. What fools we are” Props to the prof for pulling that off (if indeed he got funding for it) shame he didn’t produce anything truly groundbreaking out of it.
12/07/2009 at 15:54 Rich_P says:
CIVONY: It has electrolytes!
I like how the last ad lures you with the prospect of playing it “secretly.” You naughty devil, Civony, you.
12/07/2009 at 16:10 Larington says:
Woah, I wasn’t aware of just how far the Civony ads had progressed into full sleaze.
Meanwhile, the moment I saw the photo on the Leigh Alexander interview piece I found myself hoping that the cat was about to conduct the interview, sadly that wasn’t to be the case.
12/07/2009 at 16:13 LewieP says:
Heh, saw The Horrors at glastonbury, and they only played songs off Primary Colours.
12/07/2009 at 16:15 Vandelay says:
The Civony ads are pretty repugnant. It is not so much the use of attractive ladies but the lack of any relation between the ads and the game itself. The one that particular got me was the distressed woman with the sword hovering above her breasts. The others are amusingly bad, but I thought that one was quite offensive.
Starcraft 2 and lack of LAN was probably an inevitability. I like to play LAN games too, but the options to do so are very limited nowadays. Certainly disappointing, particular with the fantastic spawn option included in the original, but I wasn’t very surprised by it. I believe Red Alert 3 also lacked LAN options and FPSs haven’t for years.* Are hacks likely to appear for SC2? Did any appear for Red Alert 3?
*I mourn the loss of the FPS that didn’t need 30 players to be enjoyable. I have fond memories of playing my brothers at Medal of Honor, the early Quakes or Half Life. People seem to be unable to cope with games that have a lower limit than 32; just look at how long the 24 player limit of TF2 lasted and how few servers running the original number still exist, even though it plays so much better with the lower limit.
12/07/2009 at 16:28 Larington says:
Yeah, I ended up trying Civony early on because I was curious about how they’d figured the whole Queen element into the gameplay, cept there wasn’t anything of the sort so all the adverts are extremely misleading or plain wrong.
Eventually I realised just how little game there was in the game and I drifted away never to return. I got some satisfaction from building up strong cities but after that the game didn’t have any appeal what-so-ever.
12/07/2009 at 16:30 Johnny Law says:
@drewski
Not that I would send him death threats or anything, but I wouldn’t say he “obeyed the spirit of the game”. The police drones are there to protect the spawn zones. If you TP enemy players into them, I don’t believe you get any personal benefit (XP). As far as I can remember, the only reason to do it was to annoy people. If you do something like that, it’s unsurprising that people will get annoyed.
(Didn’t the devs make some change later to cut down on this sort of behavior?)
12/07/2009 at 16:35 JKjoker says:
@Vandelay: SC2 will have a MUCH greater audience than red alert3, plus RA3 sucked and ppl lost interest while there are still ppl releasing hacks/cracks/trainers/mods/maps for Diablo2, SC and War3 new patches
12/07/2009 at 16:44 Slippery Jim says:
Play ARMA2 and you don’t have this dodgy, unnatural first-person movement in the game.
12/07/2009 at 17:34 Muzman says:
On the subject of racism, it could be that I’ve recently been exposed to more ‘down-home’ environs lately, but there seems to have been an upswing since Obama got elected. Not in an angry, militant sort of way but just a lot of casual stuff like the 1930s is back.
In the mild furore over the Amos & Andy bots in Transformers 2 I saw a few comments somewhere like Rottentomatoes say, in effect, that because Obama was elected “racism was over”. So now it was ok to say and do all the tasteless things people have apparently been holding back on for years.
Idiotic though that is, I can’t help but think it’s a popular sentiment lately. The funny and complicated bit (as it has been for a while now) is that “racist” was quite successfully relegated to being the worst thing a person can be some time ago. You can’t suggest anyone is that without a tsunami of defensiveness from all and sundry. It doesn’t matter how effectively racist they are being at a given moment, calling it out will end up in a fight (I take it as; they see themselves as generally good and law abiding people, and usually that’s true, so therefore they couldn’t be anything as vile as “racist” ).
If it’s true and everyone’s feeling like they can let it all hang out (and it’s as widespread an undercurrent as it seems) that long standing disconnect between the term and the behaviour is going to cause all sorts of fun.
12/07/2009 at 17:40 Nafe says:
I love how the death threat was made out to be a significant thing. It’s really not hard to get someone to say something like that and drawing conclusions from it is really cheap.
12/07/2009 at 17:59 beetleboy says:
Tbh I cant understand that NCsoft didn’t quickly hotpatch that semi-exploit Myers was using. That sorta game mechanic just has to go..
And yeah.. I also don’t understand how on earth he could be surprised by what happened. Geez. If we depend on morons like this for telling the rest of society how games work, we’re in trouble.. “In shock & surprise, university researcher discovers people on the internet dislike trolls!” Good boy, have a cookie..
12/07/2009 at 18:05 Vinraith says:
I sincerely wonder how many people’s game experiences Myers ruined to the point of driving them out of the game by playing like an exploitative jackass. I can appreciate the value of games research, but being a dick is being a dick whether online or off.
12/07/2009 at 18:16 Bhazor says:
I’ve always loved reading choose your own adventure books as a normal book. Going from page 1 to page 2 to page 3 to page 4 to page 5 to page 6 to page 7 and so on. You end up with this weird narrative in which your character dies on every page. I’ve always thought of it like the opening of an eighties tv show. Theres you on fire, theres you opening a door, theres you getting betrayed by a woman called Clarissa, theres you getting trapped for all eternity in a ice prison, theres you agreeing to help a woman called Clarissa, theres you being sick, theres you eating an apple. Also those strange disconnected snippets at possible lives is strangely engrossing, even if it does ruin your attempt to play it properly (and vice versa).
In regards to hype, Videogaiden (viva la raza) summed it up in the appropriate way by being incredibly angry at everyone involved in anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5SNpVf5-B0
12/07/2009 at 18:31 Alex says:
The Horrors 2.0 are rather interesting, though my friend who loves their first album (as do I, I have some good memories of fleeing down midnight roads between zombie-movie-marathons and warm-girlfriend-bed powered by its more screamy parts) sniffs at the new direction.
He claims they’re Guardian-chasing. Despite being the most Guardian-reading person I know. Shrug.
12/07/2009 at 18:36 Shadrach says:
Thanks for the linky to the FF books article – sweet memories.
12/07/2009 at 19:10 John t says:
Reading the blog comments he’s written defending himself he strikes me as being possibly autistic. He definitely doesn’t seem normal. The loyola ethics board is looking into thi also because it possibly violates research guidelines for human subjects.
He’s a grown man inflicting intentional emotional distress on minors. For YEARS. And he continued after it was made clear that people were upset. It seems grossly unethical to me.
12/07/2009 at 20:20 Gap Gen says:
I remember Jim talking about magazine layouts before, and the first time PCG used a screenshot as a double-page-spread background (I think it was BF2?) It’s a shame they didn’t go to the developers and ask them for a ridiculo-resolution image, as it was a bit blocky, but it was good nonetheless. I guess part of the thing of online journalism is that if you fragment into blogs of a few journalists at a time, with maybe one part-time techie, you won’t have that art dept expertise. Part of it is also web expectations – Escapist used to use a fake-magazine format, didn’t they? In any case, the graphics for the articles are still pretty good there.
As for the proposing in interviews, yeah, he went about it totally the wrong way. You should slip it in half-way through, when they’re already nodding and going “Yeah, so…”
12/07/2009 at 20:30 Gap Gen says:
Also, yeah, I’m not sure how the CoH thing counts as research. I mean, functionally he’s spending hours in a darkened room staring at a glowing screen like many other people in research, but the results seem to be fairly predictable (note: I haven’t read his paper). There are subtle things you can do with this approach, granted, and emergent gameplay is interesting. Again, does that count as research?
12/07/2009 at 20:56 Nick says:
David Myers acted like a dick and he knows it, whilst I don’t condone death threats (though I doubt it was serious) he was asking for abuse playing that way. “Oh I’m playing within the rules, why on earth should anyone be upset?” is such a weak excuse. Though why the ‘rules’ allowed him to do that in the first place is another matter.
As for The Horrors, I think Sea within a Sea could have done with being a bit shorter, but I loved the synths.
12/07/2009 at 20:56 Sajmn says:
“Paraphrasing somewhat cruelly, it’s free so it’s full of ‘tards”
Most internet content is free, and the internet is full of tards.
12/07/2009 at 21:23 Heliocentric says:
Most people are tards, nothing to do with the internet.
12/07/2009 at 21:50 Gap Gen says:
I think social rules are always important. Something like Eve has turned the Ponzi scam into an artform, and it’s an accepted part of the game, so it’s not really griefing if you know that everyone is out to do it to some degree (although tactics like spamming someone’s connection to prevent them from responding to attacks is pretty low).
If you’re going to be reductionist about it, murdering real people with guns is totally within the physical rules of the world we live in.
12/07/2009 at 21:50 autogunner says:
I fail to see the point of the good professor’s ‘research’. This kind of morally acceptable gameplay ahs been going on for years; spawn camping in TF2, camping in counterstrike, dolphin jumping in battlefield – all the way abck to goblin sappers in warcraft.
all of these things were permitted and possible but frowned on by the players as being unethical.
12/07/2009 at 22:14 Kester says:
I can’t help but think Evony is some formidable satire on advertising and that Chris Morris will pop up some time soon to laugh at everyone. It’s certainly better than the alternative.
12/07/2009 at 22:40 Blast Hardcheese says:
@autogunner
Huh? Unless you mean the original (which I don’t remember basically at all), Goblin Sappers were an excellent way to get around defenses, and a few upgraded ranged units could kill them before they could reach their targets.
12/07/2009 at 23:41 smac says:
C’mon – this is the industry that gave us the Battlecruiser 3000AD ad featuring Jo Guest.
In case you’re not familiar, the lady in question is featured sat on a plastic chair, legs wide, facing the camera wearing nothing but a bikini-top/black bra.
With a strategically placed Battlecruiser 3000AD game box to protect her modesty.
Possibly the single most honest advertisement I have ever seen.
Not ‘honest’ as in honest about the product (diametrically opposed to that, I fear) – just the most honest expression of the advertisers art. Maybe honest is not the term I’m looking for; maybe I’m looking for ‘blatantly cynical’.
Mind you, the Civony sequence comes pretty close in that last ad.
12/07/2009 at 23:43 Adventurous Putty says:
The professor’s asinine analysis may also stem from his, to say the least, condescending attitude toward gaming communities coming into the experiment. After all, if you come into any experiment already believing something to be true, that bias may end in a self-fulfilling prophecy — even if what you believe isn’t actually true. Case in point, a very good book called the Mismeasure of Man about attempts to classify IQ by race in the 19th Century.
So anyway, yeah, stupid idiot.
13/07/2009 at 00:38 qrter says:
That Leigh Alexander interview is really, really creepy!
It starts with “Leigh Alexander is the gorgeous game journo..”, flows into the proposal and continues with “Does it help that you’re pretty?” and “Let’s talk about sex. Personally, if I had to pound some pixels, I’d go for Chun Li. Thighs like tree trunks. Your turn…”.
I’m sort of amazed Alexander didn’t tell him to stick his interview.
13/07/2009 at 01:08 Matosh says:
Which Spector, Phil or Warren?
13/07/2009 at 02:17 Quirk says:
I just came across another, new ad for Evony on your Hype-O-Chondria link. It continues the theme of the last ad in sequence, having given up on the fields background; mercifully, there’s been a zoom out, taking it back to a woman-with-cleavage rather than just displaying the cleavage. The sequence continues…
13/07/2009 at 02:40 Bret says:
Mainly when he interviews Dr. Warren Spector.
Mainly.
13/07/2009 at 04:27 Matt says:
Maybe this is just naive of me since I don’t play MMORPGs, but I kind of thought that the idea of PvP areas was, you know, for players to kill other players with all the jackassery that that would entail. And with a game that purports to be based around the idea of superheroes and supervillians, I would also expect for the killing to fall along those lines.
As best I can tell, this professor’s main crime was continually using the PvP server for it’s implied purpose, despite being told that he should not. How dare he!
13/07/2009 at 05:19 Psychopomp says:
@ Nine
They’re british
Spotify isn’t available to us americans.
Consider it their revenge for all the games on steam they can’t buy.
13/07/2009 at 05:21 Psychopomp says:
@ Matt
It’s about as close to PvP as spawn camping is to playing TF2.
13/07/2009 at 05:39 qrter says:
That doesn’t work, Spotify also isn’t available to much of Europe (including my country), much like a lot of games on Steam. :(
13/07/2009 at 06:39 radomaj says:
Hey, a new one! And they’ve got the word “Evony” back.
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4620/civonybewbs.png
13/07/2009 at 07:36 Johnny Law says:
@Psychopomp
Actually worse than spawn camping, if I’m remembering correctly about it not giving XP. At least spawn camping helps one make progress towards the goal of the game, so it’s not just something done for the purpose of pissing folks off.
13/07/2009 at 07:39 Gap Gen says:
“After all, if you come into any experiment already believing something to be true, that bias may end in a self-fulfilling prophecy — even if what you believe isn’t actually true.”
Anyone who approaches research like this isn’t actually doing research. It’s like calling join-the-dots ‘art’.
13/07/2009 at 07:44 Tony says:
FAQ:
How do I get my queen?
There is no queen in this game, the ad you saw is for marketing purposes and seems to be highly effective by the number of times this question has come up.
LOL
13/07/2009 at 07:59 Maj says:
The City of Heroes thing seems more like a testament to the failings of the game than the “unethical” behavior of the researcher. From what I’ve read, it seems like the game should have some kind of ceasefire area…
13/07/2009 at 08:13 Heliocentric says:
Maybe they should add a queen. It can be like a toned down dating game which has things like “animated gif of me dancing if you make the commoners happy.” or “make religious services available to 80% of the population and for a shot of cleavage”.
13/07/2009 at 08:14 matte_k says:
Always good to see Bloodlines getting some press, it’s much more playable now thanks the the community fix, and playing as a Malkavian is always fun- if not for the dialogue, then for the ability to kill people by driving them insane :) The article does have a point though, the world detail and personality does taper off towards the end of the game as the main quest becomes a bit more of a combat heavy trudge, and the possibility of choosing an ending that made me scream bloody murder at the screen for its dumbness is frustrating, given the detail and effort the rest of the game was constructed with. Still recommend it to anyone who’s not played it though.
13/07/2009 at 11:10 Gundrea says:
Yes at first I didn’t see why everyone was getting so uppity at the professor but re-reading I realized what was going on.
In the PvP zones there are invincible instant-killing guards just at the player spawn point for each side. What “Twixt” was doing was standing next to those guards and using the teleport foe power to teleport enemies beside him so that the guards would kill them. Constantly. He would have received no reward for this as you do not get xp for anything the guards kill.
However players killed in this way would suffer xp debt. As such the only sort of people who would engage in this tactic would be those deliberately intending to annoy other players.
This isn’t the dark side of human nature or social ostracization. This is people in a restaraunt reacting to someone coming in and flinging poop at them. You just had your meal spoiled and your suit ruined, I think you’re going to be a little ticked off.
13/07/2009 at 16:08 Doug F says:
Part of the problem with Myer’s “PVP” as I’ve heard it is that he wasn’t killing the other players himself, he was simply teleporting them to a spot where NPC guards would kill them, and that’s where most people took issue. In the City of X games, a pvp death costs you nothing, you die and you come back. When you’re killed by an NPC though, you get an “XP debt” that must be worked off. Myers was abusing this game mechanic to give enemy players a much more punishing death than proper PVP combat would have.
Also, it was cheap as hell, and the talk of his “skill” seems laughable.
13/07/2009 at 16:42 Zyrxil says:
But that’s the whole point. Even if you consider the results obvious, Myer is writing for a crowd that probably has never touched a computer game and has no idea about the social workings of online communities, to show how it works the same way online. He writes from a detached faux-naive perspective because that is what is expected, and he does the testing with multiple characters (though he should’ve made characters with different names) to satisfy thoroughness.
13/07/2009 at 18:13 Maj says:
If he was playing within the boundaries of the game’s rules, and the game lets you abuse the rules to instagib anyone, isn’t it the game developers’ fault rather than a griefer who is taking advantage of it? On the other hand, the professor claims he is operating within the “rules” of the game when it was obviously not intended to be that way. Playing by the rules is one thing, but what if he changed that to “exploiting the game”?
13/07/2009 at 19:02 Funky Badger says:
Maj: bad behaviour is only ever the fault of the perpetrator. The game may have facilitated that behaviour but the fault is all his own.
13/07/2009 at 19:06 Vinraith says:
@Funky Badger
I’d argue that the fault is that of the perpetrator, but the lack of repercussion (and consequently the repetition of the act) is on the developers. I wouldn’t be surprised if their failure to respond to this exploit cost them some subscription money…
13/07/2009 at 19:17 DMJ says:
Evony ads, Supplemental: They turned some perfectly harmless sites I was viewing into something that was borderline NSFW. Wow, an ad that causes me to slam the entire window closed. Takes some doing.
13/07/2009 at 19:17 Zyrxil says:
If he was playing within the boundaries of the game’s rules, and the game lets you abuse the rules to instagib anyone, isn’t it the game developers’ fault rather than a griefer who is taking advantage of it? On the other hand, the professor claims he is operating within the “rules” of the game when it was obviously not intended to be that way. Playing by the rules is one thing, but what if he changed that to “exploiting the game”?
Any action is only explicitly an ‘exploit’ if it is done through abusing bugs. Using game mechanics that are deemed unfair by other players is not exploiting.
13/07/2009 at 19:32 Zyrxil says:
Didn’t there used to be an Edit button?
Anyway, similarly, not respecting “faction collusion” is not exploiting.
13/07/2009 at 20:05 Funky Badger says:
Vin: interesting point. It seems the “community” censured him in their own way (much as would have happened in any small community since people first congregated together.
Someone saiud upthread “being a dick is being a dick” which wouldn’t make much of a thesis but does get right to the heart of the matter.
13/07/2009 at 23:55 invisiblejesus says:
Quick reply regarding the Myers article: there are two points he’s not mentioning, by which I suspect he’s intentionally trying to mislead readers who haven’t played City of Heroes:
1) Twixt wasn’t nearly as infamous as Dr. Myers claims; I’m sure he was much hated by the small PvP community on his home server (CoH does not have a large PvP community on any server). But I’ve been playing the game off and on since release, I know a lot of people there. I use the forums relatively regularly. The first I heard of this guy was following a link in the dev tracker on the forums to a thread about this article. There’s no question that he upset some people, but the claim that he was broadly known and hated across the game community is patently ridiculous. I don’t know anyone who’s ever even mentioned the guy, and from what I read on the message boards not too many people outside the server he played on were aware of him at all.
2) Teleporting other players into the guards is considered harrassment and is petitionable. I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I remember pretty clearly the developers saying some time ago that the main problem with it is that it’s difficult to enforce any rule against it, since their policy is that a customer service rep has to witness him doing it repeatedly to the same person. So while it’s not against the rules to do it once, and it’s easy to get away with doing it over and over again, to say that it’s within the intentions of the developers is asinine. There are several game mechanical functions that implicitly confirm this, but I’m not going to bore non-CoHers with the nuts and bolts of it.
In short, basically the guy is dishonest as well as a dick, and he’s trying to profit from it. Don’t make the mistake of taking him seriously.
14/07/2009 at 07:10 mister slim says:
The Dr. Myers thing is kind of an interesting inversion of Bow Nigger.
14/07/2009 at 07:58 drygear says:
@qrter
I thought it was creepy too. I think the worst is the very first comment, especially after she clearly mentions in the interview that she is uncomfortable when people comment on her appearance in the context of her work. Also, the “how did you get this interview?” comes off as the commenter wanting to get hooked up with her.
14/07/2009 at 10:08 Dante says:
On the professor thing; I think comparing it to going on a killing spree is a bit extreme.
It’s more like you’re having a kickabout in the park, and you and an opponent stop for a second to have a chat, then some guy on your team repeatedly slide tackles him shouting “Go Team!”. For years. And the park is the only place you can play. And you have to pay to go there.
I doubt the professor communicated much with the other players either (he could hardly explain himself without comprimising his study). In my experience players who talk less are more likely to receive abuse. On a TF2 server I frequent one player is one of the best I’ve ever played against, he never speaks, types once in a blue moon, barely does any teamwork and simply kills you, in the harshest and most abrupt ways possible, over and over again. He gets abuse, ahibet jokey abuse (someone once asserted he has no face) There’s another player even better than him, but he is freindly, chatty and joins in the fun. He is well liked.
If you act like a kill-bot, people will treat you like one.