When obeying rules go wrong. University …
When obeying rules go wrong. University professor plays City of Heroes where 2 groups of players – heroes and villains – battle it out. While that is conceived as the point of the game, City of Heroes players are often chatting amongst themselves peacefully, preferring to battle non-playable characters. David Myers, a Loyola professors, chose to play by the rules and created the character ‘Twixt’ which promptly becomes the most hated in the game.
Myers expressed:
The most surprising result of Twixt’s play within RV was not merely the severity of the online community’s negative reactions to his behavior, but the degree to which game rules played such an insignificant role in those reactions. That is, the social order within CoH/V seemed to operate quite independently of game rules and almost solely for the sake of its own preservation. It did not seem within the purview of social orders and ordering within CoH/V to recognize (much less nurture) any sort of rationality – or, for that matter, any other supra-social mechanism that might have adjudicated Twixt’s behavior on the basis of its ability to provide, over time, greater knowledge of the game system or, in a broader sense, what Sutton-Smith (2001) has called “the potentiation of adaptive variability” (p. 231).
