id":26892720,"user":"ilamont","time":1619026118,"time_ago":"4 years ago","type":"comment","content":"

Reminded me of story more than a decade ago about an academic who conducted a series of "breaching experiments" in City of Heroes/City of Villains to study group behavior, basically breaking the social rules (but not the game rules) without other participants' or the game studio's knowledge. It was discussed on HN in 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690551)

Here's how the professor (a sociologist) described his methodology:

These three sets of behaviors – rigidly competitive pvp tactics (e. g., droning), steadfastly uncooperative social play outside the game context (e. g., refusing to cooperate with zone farmers), and steadfastly uncooperative social play within the game context (e. g., playing solo and refusing team invitations) – marked Twixt’s play from the play of all others within RV.

Translation: He killed other players in situations that were allowed by the game's creators but frowned upon by the majority of real-life participants. For instance, "villains" and "heroes" aren't supposed to fraternize, but they do anyway. When "Twixt" happened upon these and other situations -- such as players building points by taking on easy missions against computer-generated enemies -- he would ruin them, often by "teleporting" players into unwinnable killzones. The other players would either die or have their social relations disrupted. Further, "Twixt" would rub it in by posting messages like:

Yay, heroes. Go good team. Vills lose again.

The reaction to the experiment and to the paper was what you would expect. The author later said it wasn't an experiment in the academic sense, claiming:

... this study is not really an experiment. I label it as a “breaching experiment” in reference to analogous methods of Garfinkel, but, in fact, neither his nor my methods are experimental in any truly scientific sense. This should be obvious in that experimental methods require some sort of control group and there was none in this case. Likewise, experimental methods are characterized by the manipulation of a treatment variable and, likewise, there was none in this case.

Links:

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university...

https://www.ilamont.com/2009/07/academic-gets-rise-from-brea...","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"url":"item?id=26892720"}

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