Who’s Rulz?

Who gets to decide what’s good gaming and what is bad - player base, publisher, Microsoft !! ?

It’s pretty safe to say that notion of what is appropriate game play is highly contested and there are a bunch of actors who feel that they have the determining voice.

We have had a recent example (thx 2 Mia for picking up on this one) of publisher fiat with the case of Square Enix’s banning of not 1, not 2, but 800+ accounts. Here is the text of the official edict on the subject:

From:FINAL FANTASY XI
Feb. 14, 2005 19:30 [PST]

Actions Taken Due to Member Agreement Violations

On February 14, over 800 accounts which repeatedly violated the PlayOnline Member Agreement were permanently banned from PlayOnline.

The users of these accounts would form groups to monopolize the hunting spots of notorious monsters (NM). They also repeatedly performed harassment and MPK actions against other players.

Grief tactics, including harassment, are listed in the PlayOnline Member Agreement as violations and are not allowed for any reason. Also, interfering other players' game play in order to monopolize monsters which spawn in hunting spots is not allowed.

Based on the above, we have taken strict actions against players who have violated the PlayOnline Member Agreement.

If you become a victim of harrasment, please make a GM Call and report the issue directly to a Game Master.

Your understanding and cooperation will help us provide the best experience possible to our players.

OK, so as the blogsphere seems to think the accounts that have been banned are probably gil farmers. So those that don’t like farmers or the direct / indirect effects will probably be happy about this move, but closer inspection of the wording might cause people concern.

The notice references the PlayOnline Member Agreement, the full text can be found here: secure.playonline.com/supportus/rule_polmember.html

4.4 Revocation of User Rights. SEI shall reserve the right in its sole discretion to revoke or suspend your PlayOnline user account and your ability to use PlayOnline at any time without prior notice to you, particularly but not limited to if SEI should determine (in its sole discretion) or should reasonably believe that you are responsible for, or have participated in, any of the following (collectively, "Prohibited Activities"):

,,,

(f) Harassing, tormenting, intimidating, pestering, obstructing, taking advantage of, or any way hurting or damaging other Users or any third parties or their properties utilizing the PlayOnline Service;

Now I’m not so much interested in the language of rights being used here or the extent of contractual powers that publisher may or may not have, what I’m focusing on in this post is the way that the sphere of appropriate play is being constructed.

The implicit (using Salen & Zimmerman’s Operational / Constitutive / Implicit Rule model) or social rules that form one boundary of appropriate play seem to be solely determined by the publisher, and it’s not like either their terms of interpretation of those terms is settled.

For example, I often play a healer MMOs and I don’t think I’ve been on a single raid where I have not been ‘pestered’ for heals in fact I’d say I regularly get ‘harassed’ if I don’t manage the finger magic of looking after an entire group on my lonesome. But according to the above just about everyone around is in breach of contract and could be banned. But I don’t want them banned; I like the stress and reward of saving their asses.

Then there is ‘taking advantage of’, well I’ve not bought anything off a merchant where I did not think that they saw me coming and heard the jangle of happy credits / gold in my virtual pocket – I mean have you -seen- the price of armour these days?

More generally, all MMOs have internal economies of some form, they are pretty much modelled on capitalism which is often characterised as the systemisation of “taking advantage” of people.

One interesting intervention into the debate over griefing (see works such as Defining Grief Play in MMORPGs: Player and Developer Perceptions (2004) C.Y. Foo and E.M.I Koivisto) that has just come to my attention is by Microsoft:

Under the title Ready, set, game: Learn how to keep video gaming safe and fun. Microsoft have a couple of pages targeted at parents with the stated intention of giving them information to keep kids ‘safe’.

Tips for parents to help kids play it safe with online games
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/gamingonline.mspx

10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/griefers.mspx

I love the opening of the second one: “Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies”.

Erm,,, snerts and twinks???

But seriously, given the power of Microsoft in forming views of the average parent, this seems a significant intervention in the construction not only of cheating but of virtual spaces generally.

My concern being that I don’t like the idea of virtual spaces being seen necessarily as ‘child safe’ or on the other hand ‘unsafe’.

This bleeds into ideas of appropriate conduct. I’m not arguing for ‘grief world’ but for virtual spaces to offer opportunities for otherness and transgression in all kinds of ways. Here I’m not particularly talking about sexual themes, rather conduct and themes are adult orientated or even just out side the narrow ways in which we tend to want to understand children’s conduct (see Sutton-Smith and others work on how children actually play).

So we need to be careful that don’t norm them too quick. I don’t want to close down the parameters of appropriate play too quickly, and certainly don't think that ‘child safe’ should not be a universal rule – big boys and girls like to play games too.

Though I’m not sure I’m that worried right now. While publishes might assume that they have the right to define the kinds of conduct and speech in virtual worlds, transgression is alive and well in the form of player protest, riots and form explosions that seem to a regular feature of current MMOs.

So, who’s rulz?

Everyone’s.

Comments

[ren]

1.

omg, MS also offer advice “in character”:

Confessions of a Gr1epheR

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/lifestyle/funwithfriends-griefers.htm

[Arnold Hendrick]

2.

Having been a producer overseeing an MMOG, including the entire customer service organization that dealt with player complaints, I believe that simple economic realities and commercial self-interest will prevent any sane corporate entity from letting players abuse whatever petition/complaint system exists within the game.

It isn't just a matter of the lost revenue from the players kicked out of the game.

Rather, it's the cost of your GM/CSR (Gamemasters or Customer Service Reps - names differ) corps. MMOG managers long ago learned that you can't let the GM/CSRs do whatever they please. Capricious bannings and playing favorites drive away players even faster than griefers. When managing a game, you must be seen as scrupulously fair and honorable by a wide majority of players.

Therefore, every "action" against a customer, be it a 1-hour suspension or an account cancellation, must be carefully supervised by at least one and preferably two or three higher levels of scrutiny. Therefore, the bad behavior must be logged and a demonstrable pattern be shown, so the GM/CSR who wants to issue the ban can justify it to his or her superiors. Many complaints are nothing but "revenge attacks" against other players with whom they have a personal quarrel. If you banned everyone who quarreled, you'd end up with very few customers. Instead, you want to ban people who are pissing off a large and diverse population of players.

Needless to say, this is expensive. It gets more complicated and expensive when you realize the potential bad apple needs to be cross-linked with other player-names under the same account, or even different accounts using the same address, credit card, guild or other identifying feature. All this time and effort costs money. In short, it costs good money to track down bad apples. Furthermore, you normally start with short-term bans (a few hours to a few days). Only after repeated violations do you invoke the "final solution" of completely terminating the account.

However, the costs of not banning players is even greater, since one bad player can drive away droves of good ones. MMOG managers know that if you lose a player, getting them back is often impossible and always very costly. Therefore, you must police your game if you want to maintain the largest possible number of paying subscribers.

[Scott]

3.

Large scale bannings are nothing new, as I'm sure some of the UO CS veterans who post here can attest. Generally if there's an exploit that's been left unchecked, it's a good way to find all the people who'd, well, use things like that.

And the last time I heard the term "snert" was in the BBS milieu, about 15 years ago? Microsoft's a bit behind. Although I took some mild glee that in a similar "warning" they labeled using the term "pwn" as a sign of possible law breaking.

[gus andrews]

4.

You know, I wouldn't worry too much about Microsoft's attempts to educate parents. I could see that influencing the player culture of very young children, but you know that when kids hit junior high they're going to clue in that their parents don't really understand what goes on in games anyway, and they're going to go with the rules their gaming peers develop for appropriate conduct. I mean, so long as parents aren't playing. And parents who are playing are likely to norm with players and not Microsoft anyway.

[Darin]

5.

So I guess PvP won't ever come about.

[cheem]

6.

A "twink" is a low-level character made by someone with a higher level character. Twinking is the process of decking out this low-level character with the high-level's hand-me-downs and funds. Doesn't have much to do with in-game harassment.

I never heard of "snerts", but I have heard of "smurfs". That term is more applicable to games with a ranking system, though and can be considered a form of harassment.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

7.

cheem> A "twink" is a low-level character made by someone with a higher level character. Twinking is the process of decking out this low-level character with the high-level's hand-me-downs and funds. Doesn't have much to do with in-game harassment.

They approach true newbies pretending to be on the same level. Then the twinks gank them. It is harassment-by-design.

[Dave Rickey]

8.

Guilds primarily function as twinking environments, large guilds anyway (a "twink" doesn't have to be the alt of a veteran player).

--Dave

[Mia]

9.

I'm still confused about 'cheese player.' :P

More seriously, maybe all of this ties in with larger arguments that these days (at least in North America) our 'public' environments (where we go outside the house to socialize, debate, hang out, eat) are really privatized. Places like malls, entertainment centers, movie theaters, and even sponsored parks are controlled by private organizations that are more about image and control than individual rights and freedom of assembly. Why would they be?

Related to that, there's been a discussion on the Women in Game Development SIG list about private spots at GDC for women that need to breast-feed babies. Someone pointed out that such shielded spots, aside from bathroom stalls, are pretty much gone from our current buildings. We've allowed private corporations to control the spaces for almost all our public and private lives, so I guess games shouldn't be any different.

Maybe one question is, if virtual worlds are going to be important spots for socializing and debate, maybe there should be 'publicly accessible' ones, much like public parks today, funded by public funds.

[Matt Mihaly]

10.

Mia wrote:

Maybe one question is, if virtual worlds are going to be important spots for socializing and debate, maybe there should be 'publicly accessible' ones, much like public parks today, funded by public funds.

But if what you're looking for are virtual worlds not controlled by corporations, permit to point you to mudconnector.com. About 1500 virtual worlds listed there, no more than 20 or so that are even commercialized.

And, you could always just download a free codebase and start your own.

--matt

[ren]

11.

Mia > Maybe one question is, if virtual worlds are going to be important spots for socializing and debate, maybe there should be 'publicly accessible' ones, much like public parks today, funded by public funds.

On the previous points of control we’ve discussed Free Speech rights in VWs here before in relation to Peter Jenkins’s and Jack Balkin's papers on the subject (all the links are here: Http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/07/chickasaw_in_cy.html) and I’m currently working on a paper on privacy in virtual worlds.

However the idea of public ones is interesting. I remember I talk at AoIR the other year about using some notions of public ownership such as those applied to national parks to some virtual stuff. It’s interesting to bring notions of commons and public good back into this stuff.

I guess spaces a the moment are in this uncomfortable place, they are corporate with all the dictatorial control that the brings but trying to have these psudo-public good values, its working in a limited sense but if VWs want to really grow then as Mia says, maybe we need to take a radial look at control.

[Jim]

12.

Mia wrote:

>I'm still confused about 'cheese player.' :P>

Cheese is usually defined as a player who uses very simple yet very effective methods in PvP. I haven't seen PvE ever referred to as cheese.

This is a lame statement by Microsoft, though, as "cheese" in a game is almost always a flaw in the balance of the game.

An example of cheese might be this: my character has two special abilities that immobilize my enemy. I have found a way to alternately repeat these two abilities over and over, keeping my enemy "locked".

Because of this simple, easy pattern, I can defeat players and perhaps monsters that I normally couldn't. Also, this pattern makes it almost impossible for even superior players to compete with me.