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Professor Studies Gaming Social Norms By Being A Jerk »

Myers’ experience started with a modest goal: after observing how City of Heroes was being played by gamers for a number of years (or what most of us would just call ‘playing the game’ ) he created a superhero identity, “Twixt,” whose goal was to play the game in the way that most accurately captured the rules and spirit of the game’s design – knowing that it would put him at odds with some of the social norms he had witnessed emerge in City of Heroes’ community.

In essence, Myers played Twixt as if he was Superman: his sole goal was to bring villains to justice, while respecting the law of the land (i.e. the game’s rules and EULA). As Myers explains in his paper, this put led him to commit three social taboos within the City of Heroes Universe:
The first is that some characters – including his own character Twixt – have the ability to teleport other characters to nearby locations. Teleporting an opponent into a group of enemy NPCs or turrets that protect team zones would result in the player getting attacked by those enemies. While not against any rules (and thus fair game for Twixt) it had become frowned upon and eventually “forbidden” by the online community.

Secondly, Myers refused to leave alone villains who were farming; in order to gain experience, heroes and villains would often ignore each other in battle zones (as well as ignore the mission objective of capturing control points for their team), instead allowing stronger NPCs on their team to kill weaker opponent NPCs, which would gain them big amounts of experience. As a superhero sworn to justice, Myers would attack any villain he saw, breaking the silent agreement between heroes and villains to live and let live. But honestly, what kind of hero would collude with a villain for profit anyway?! Superman would be so ashamed…
The final taboo Myers committed was to refuse to team up with other players, instead working alone. This was a decision he made after being tricked numerous times by players who would invite him onto a team of heroes, only to help the villains kill his character. Myers was really unpopular.

You’ll notice that based on this behavior, Myers wasn’t actually being a jerk at all; he didn’t break any rules, exploit any glitches, or do anything the designers didn’t envision for the game, like team killing – he used the abilities created by the designers, to reach the goals the designers had laid out in front of him. Surely no one could get mad at him for that, right?
We won’t spoil what happened next (despite being written in scholar-speak, Myers’ paper is a really interesting and entertaining read), but let’s just say he wasn’t warmly embraced by the City of Heroes community. In fact, reading some of the messages Myers received that are incorporated into his paper, it was frightening how many times he was told that everyone in the world hates him. Myers discussion of the ostracism, coercion, and unwavering peer pressure he faced by gamers trying to get him to “play right” is extremely insightful, and it aptly demonstrates how often in life our society’s laws (or in this case the rules of a game) conflict with the other code we all obey: social acceptance.

We all bow down to the god of social acceptance, no matter how rebellious we think we are.