Loyola University professor drives City of Heroes/Villains players crazy, all for sociology

omg i played with this dude on city of heroes. he rarely talked and was really good.

Why is this guy getting paid to try to discover that online societies that rise up inside of games have social mores? Sociology 101 teaches you that! And, just like in any society, ignoring the mores will not allow you to fit well into society!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mores

So, not only was he "acting like a jerk", he was purposefully ignoring the rules set up by the society. Of course people were pissed at him. The only thing that's remarkable about this whole thing was that he didn't know it would happen from the start.

Personally, I think he just likes being a jerk, and wanted to get paid to play an MMO and grief people. I hope the review board looks at this guy long and hard.

I don't feel like he understands the definition of "rules."

In the paper he insists that he is following the rules, and the other players are ignoring them, but it seems to me that that mischaracterizes the situation completely.

Instead what you have is players filling in areas that lack rules with their own rules. It is not against the rules to NOT PvP in a PvP area or to not use an unfair game tactic. You can choose not to and that's not "against the rules." The players aren't ignoring the rules they are simply making a choice not to do something in an area where it's allowed.

If I go into an area where walking on the grass is allowed, it's not breaking the rules to choose not to walk on the grass And if everyone who frequents the area mutually agrees to stay off the grass except for one person, then the person who chooses to walk on the grass isn't "following the rules." He is doing something that he is allowed to do, but there is no rule that he must do it.

His proposition that people "ignore rules" when they cause social harm is faulty then, because no one is ignoring any rules. There's no rule that says you must teleport people into the guard area and no rule that says you have to fight at all times in a PvP area. They are making up their own rules where they feel the current rules are lacking, not ignoring rules that are in place. And he is not "following rules" by playing in the way he did. He wasn't breaking them either, but there was no rule that he must act that way.

Don't you all get it? He only offered this information so he could study you all going crazy over it again right here!...lol. Old goat.

I played quite a bit with Twixt in zone. The guy spent so many hours it was ridiculous. I figured he was just a kid with social problems, until the "research paper" was released.

SG coalitionmates- or people from RV, where TWIXT pvp'ed knew this wasn't research.

He would sometimes get upset and talk trash to others, but left that out of his "research." He would spend a half-hour straight, teleporting people he couldn't beat to pill boxes, etc just to harass. He had social problems and was eventually kicked out of an in-game Super Group because of his social problems. He later claimed to be a victim and simple researcher, but that was after the fact.

He had basically every "time out" power he could get. And I still saw and helped beat him quite a bit. He would get frustrated and quit. That wasn't research. That was video game addiction.

He didn't log on for hours straight, doing everything considered socially disrespectful in the game, all for the sake of research. He called it research later, and tried to become famous off it.

Whatever people think about whether he should have or should not have acted as he did, the "experiment" and "research" were after the fact.