Margaret

With unknowing and and actually unknown participants you can not conclude to any real world social standarts.
He may or may not have ben griefing kids, which would not be included in a social testing environment without serious supervision by the universities board members or the appropriate institution in his field of research.
To conclude on moral behaviour and social standarts without a clearly definded group of players which to analyze, without a control group (social standarts in mmo´s while not grieved for example).

I think it is infuriating that he conducts “research” on probable minors (children under age).
As well as harassing a passerby.
Many mmo´s are a famous pasttime for wide groups of people, including mentally or phisically challenged people.
Who are experiencing some form of freedom online (we have a paraplegic in our WoW guild).

I would asume mmo´s are significantly bad for research because of the widespread customerbase.
You cant really decide wether or not the person flaming you for griefing is of a mature age, or mentally adult to begin with.

I do hope someone points out his methodic flaws to him.

Bad Science won´t get us to Mars will it?

I will say that what turns me off was his choice of tactics. His reaction seems to be that of somebody who didn’t really stop to think about what he was doing by teleporting enemies off to get killed by guards. To an old-timer, this sounds like the days of MCing in Blackrock Mountain. Technically, it was legal, but it was still a nasty tactic to resort to, since the victim would die in the lava repeatedly and run up a migraine-inducing repair bill. It was less of a problem here, since if you were on a PvE server it was your fault you flagged up. The person doing it has to understand the trouble they’re making for their opponent though. More a question of human empathy than working off the game’s rules to the letter.

I think that this kind of thing would have been best avoided by action from the developers though, and reviewing this again I’d say that the biggest source of the problem was a lack of attention by the developers. I’m glad to say that in WoW, something like this would’ve probably been quickly dealt with by just making the trick no longer possible. In that regard, the PvP zone itself seems ill-conceived. I know from WoW PvP that people constantly push the limits of rules to find a way to gain an edge. In that regard, it’s like a sport you play in RL. While plenty of responsibility lies with the players to use their judgement and be good sports, a lot also lies with the developers to monitor their rules and make sure they create a fair game. If a tactic is discovered that’s against the spirit of the game, or that’s impossible to stop, the people who made the sport/game should deal with it, in addition to those playing trying to be fair about it.

If a particular MMO explicitly allowed users to “grief” other users, that would be one thing, but I don’t think it does an amusement park much good for its bottom line if allowed or even encouraged visitors to interfere with the other visitors’ ability to interact with its attractions. Basically, it’s bad business.

As a paying customer, I would seriously resent any other user infringing on my enjoyment of the amusement park, and I categorically reject anyone’s claim of griefing being a right because of the online, socially interactive nature of an MMO. If it were something I knowingly signed up for (a hypothetical MMO called “Screw Yr Buddy”?), that’d be one thing, but for my $15 a month, I want my loop-de-loop roller coaster without someone leaving an upended ice cream cone in my seat.

The presumed anonymity of online environments encourages people to believe that they can behave in any way they wish. At the same time, what happens to people online is something that they keep with them after they log off – the constant refrain of “it’s only a game” is nonsense. That dividing line is at best blurry, and more often an arbitrary demarcation.

It’s probably just a matter of time before some serious assault or murder is committed because of a transgression or an offense committed in an online environment (or has something like that happened already?). Would that be a case of someone with anger management issues “who took things too seriously,” or an instance of an ever-growing list of (insert)-rage that seems to be a continually rising barometer of society’s trapped, untapped frustration?

Bottom line, it may seem like a game, but as Charlie Heston once said about Solyent Green, “it’s people.” Step on someone’s virtual toes one time too many, and don’t be too surprised if he tracks you down in person to return the favor with interest. So, the methodology and conclusions of this particular “social experiment” seem as a truism as going out into a storm without an umbrella and declaring that rain is wet.

While I don’t think that the PvP system is necessarily “torture”, it is unethical if you work at a University to perform “research” without approval of that University’s Human Subjects Protection review board (even for “exempt” status studies, if it qualifies as research with human subjects, you need to have approval from the IRB).

Outside the domain of “research,” you can do all sorts of things within a video game. However, claiming “I was a griefer in the name of research” is really just wrong on many levels, and I’m honestly not surprised at the backlash.

While it would have been okay if he had observed the behaviors of other people doing griefing without needing consent from the people playing the characters in the game. Actually going in and manipulating the game environment, resulting in the “subjects” losing experience points or other loss of in-game items, isn’t something I could see as being very ethical.

There are much better methods to do video game research in a much more ethical manner, and data from what he did is probably not actually publishable in scientific journals (at least, I hope it isn’t!), especially if he did it without IRB approval.

If you can’t defeat the boss at the end of Final Fantasy you’ve got no one to blame but yourself and the game developers for making it too hard. You’re up against a series of code and some RNG bad luck. When you play an MMO you’re playing against actual people. They bring their personal preferences, play styles and likes/dislikes to the game. Depending on the flexibility of the game environment they can have great or little effect on the game time of other players. Case in point: cross-faction chat. That is a restriction on player interaction. Imagine WoW without any chat. Imagine WoW with the only inter-player interaction consisting of duel/trade/invite.

What if WoW (or other MMOs) had an in-game ‘legal system’? EULAs aren’t game rules, the way that Monopoly rules are. The EULA/ToA limits your conduct as a player specifically (e.g. don’t make illegal copies of the game disc), and your conduct as a character in the game very generally (e.g. don’t exploit). These are two *completely different* sets of rules and situations.

Despite this, rules governing character conduct creep into MMOs. Why? Because we are people IRL. Some examples: you “steal” from the guild bank -> your guild kicks you. You rip someone off in a trade -> they never trade with you again/you get a bad reputation. You ninja loot -> you never get PuGs with those people again. We impose our own unwritten set of rules on the game, and on other players in it, and expect them to abide by them.

Twixt is a prime example of when someone doesn’t. You’re not ripping off a computer here, Yogg doesn’t know that you’ve ‘exploited’ a game mechanic to beat him. If there was a person on the receiving end, though, they would know that something was ‘hinky’.

In this sense an MMO is a self-regulating community. Those that do not follow the community’s customary norms and rules will find themselves swiftly ostracized.
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No, it’s not nice that I enjoy playing that way, and I do see how there are likely psychological ramifications that lead to justifying such behavior, but I find that I completely separate actions in-game and those in real life.

I’ve been destroyed in MMOs to where it affected me IRL, and I was okay with that because it happened within the rules of the gaming environment. I put the same blame on others whom I affect in game: put yourself in a position of weakness, and I’ll do what I can to take advantage of it.

And the reason I find it so rewarding is because I feel as though I have a lasting effect on the game world. I might be able to do that in a positive manner, too, but the negative impact on another player (through griefing, not being a jerk in trade chat) has a more immediate affect that offers instant gratification that I can see rather than simply knowing I did a good deed. Yeah, it’s kind of a jerk thing to do. But I don’t go out of my way to be a jerk socially; I do so within the confines of the gaming world.
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I know several people who included interviews with living authors as part of their dissertation research. All that’s necessary is a consent form.

However, I believe that Myers is correct in that he does not need consent to cite forum posts. Those are by very nature in the public domain and thus fair game.

As for his chat logs and whispers? I think the permission he would need to cite them in his eventual book would actually come from NCsoft, as they “own” the characters, the world, and presumably, any player-created content. I’d have to read the EULA but I’m almost certain that Myers doesn’t have to get permission from the individual authors before he can cite them.

Whether it is, or isn’t, an experiment depends on the methodology. I’m leaning toward “isn’t”–which would make his work more of a nonfiction book based on personal experience. I’ll be watching for it to come out, but it might come from a trade book type press rather than an academic one.

Besides, dude has tenure. That gives him a little bit of leeway in how he writes and publishes his study.