See? octopus gets it.
Gets what? That violating the TOS gets you banned? Who DOESN’T get that?
You seem to agree that picking an avatar’s pocket is okay. How is that possible? Doesn’t that violate your ethical/moral principles? Is it not immoral/unethical to steal from someone?
Playing UO and D&D back in the day made me think long and hard on these subjects. I always play a nice guy in games because I have a hard time not thinking about the person on the other side of the screen. I took being pk’ed so personally. My hands would shake. My heart would race. I’d get very irate. But I also felt a thrill when I started to be able to kill pk’ers.
So I spent a lot of times on the forums reading the pros and cons and I started to believe that pk’ers had various intent. Some were pure jackasses. Others were not. So my thinking changed to how do you structure a rule set to give people choices and maximize fun. Why not let people choose what level of interaction?
The problem with UO, in my eyes after participating in the UO forums and seeing a different perspective, was that the game had tremendous potential but subjecting a portion of the player base to an unnecessarily unpleasant experience was frustrating and counterproductive. What harm could occur from accommodating each play style? None. Except it pissed off those who wanted to kill those who had absolutely 0 desire to participate in PvP. And those people are jackasses.
I’ve read about Eve and I wonder if some of that behavior crosses my line of ethics. I mean if you knowingly play a cutthroat game is it unethical to be cutthroat?
I genuinely can’t tell if this is sarcasm, or if you really think that’s the part of his post I’m referring to.
Yes, it is immoral to steal from a person. A video game character is not a person, and at no point in this thread have I been talking about how to treat video game characters. I have, repeatedly and explicitly, said I’m talking about how you treat actual people.
So stealing from a computer generated character is okay?
Going with the playing games in a field analogy…
Let’s say one particular park has some playing fields and decides to host a game, and advertises that ‘football’ will be played on a particular field.
The day of the game, most of the players line up in two lines in the middle of the field with one non-spherical ball; several players arrive kicking a spherical ball see this happen, realize this isn’t the game they thought it would be, and leave.
However, soon after the game starts some of the players become very upset. The ball isn’t turned over after three downs, the way it obviously should be. A first down was claimed to have been achieved after only 9.8 metres of forward progress, and several formations used were clearly illegal. These players complain bitterly about how the other players are ‘cheating’ and not playing the game the way it should be played.
Seeing the problem, the park owners set up another field for ‘Canadian rules football’. Everyone is happier, but even after being given their own field the Canadian rules football folks claim that this proves that they were right all along and the other folks were dirty vile cheaters who were playing the game wrong.
You analogy fundamentally fails, for a few reasons:
- In your analogy, the field in question is designated for play with specific objectives (i.e., soccer), and some people misunderstand those objectives. UO was not set up with any specific objectives in mind; people therefore had to decide what they’d have for their own personal objectives. The difference between joining a game with well-defined objectives which you just misunderstood, and engaging in play in a space in which there are no well-defined objectives and so everyone makes their own, is crucial.
- In your analogy, people don’t talk with one another to sort things out. In UO, people could do that. Those who were talking, who expressed discontent with bump’s playstyle, were ignored.
- In your analogy, and this is also crucial, everyone could conceivably play the same way. In bump’s situation, his playstyle depending on other people not playing his way: they needed to go off and make things or kill monsters, so that he could profit from banditry. It’s as if the soccer players were only able to play soccer as long as the American football players stayed on the field trying and failing to play American football. Your analogy breaks down here as well.
I do. That’s why I only play on RP servers.
I think it’s pretty telling that the crowd arguing ‘unethical’ has switched from talking about in-game actions like attacking other characters in a PVP game to verbal harassment of players, and is trying to blur the line between the two. People playing a game via game mechanics by the rules as intended by the developers and people engaging in verbal harassment by flinging racial and sexual slurs are two very distinct groups, and all that trying to conflate them does is highlight the weakness of the argument that the first group is somehow unethical for playing the game.
People object to all kinds of things that are legitimate in games, that doesn’t mean that someone who is playing by the rules is unethical, but would by the logic used here. EVE is a MMO game where scamming, ganking, and warring with other players is not only allowed but encouraged by the developers, but apparently if you play it as the developers intend you’re ‘unethical’ because some people playing will objecy. Bridge is a game where players are allowed to use different bidding systems, but some players object to other people using anything but what they’re used to, which apparently means you can be unethical in Bridge if you go to a region where they use 5-card majors but you and your partner use an older system with 4-card majors. Lots of people simply don’t like losing a game, and so object if someone else wins, but it’s not unethical for someone to win a game.
A feature of the game that allows another player to cause a negative result for you does not “ruin” your playing experience any more than landing on a fully upgraded Boardwalk does in monopoly or getting dunked on in basketball. Roleplaying doesn’t even come into it, that’s just plain playing.
Exactly. And MMORPGs are, by their nature, competitive. Someone’s going to take the resource you wanted or camp the monster you wanted or race you to a raid location. The whole concept of a “living world” requires people to sometimes be standing where you want to be standing. PVP is the culmination of inter-player competition but you can “ruin someone’s day” by taking all the resource nodes in an area or killing the 3-day spawn they wanted to kill just as easily.
Pantastic makes an excellent point on how the conversation is going from it being supposedly unethical to engage in game behaviors to trying to make it about racism or sexual assault or other stuff that is frankly a major stretch to compare to in-game features.
It’s equally manson and some others who started taking it down those garden paths.
Again, analogizing to bridge or basketball is fundamentally different. I disagree that MMORPGs are by their nature competitive. When I went to a potluck in a park this evening, I scored one of the few picnic tables, but that doesn’t mean that picnics are by their nature competitive. PVP is different in kind, not in amount, from competing for a resource node.
And in bridge, everyone enters the game agreeing to a zero-sum game; everyone knows that the thing they want (winning) necessarily involves someone else losing. The strategies chosen to achieve that goal might be more or less effective, but they’re totally different from something like UO, where some people are planning on a positive-sum game and others force them to play a zero-sum game.
And the kind of PVP bump describes–in which he’s doing it specifically because it’s easier to gain resources by stealing from other players than by engaging in non-stealy behaviors–is even more different. If everyone competes for a resource node, that’s a viable strategy for everyone. If everyone relies on other people to produce resources that they can then steal, that’s not a viable strategy for anyone.
Potlucks aren’t games but you were competing regardless. Heck, musical chairs is based on limited seating 
PVP isn’t significantly different from other MMO competition. In MMORPGs, the player investment is time: time spent killing monsters, collecting loot, gathering crafting resources, actually crafting, traveling, etc. If someone kills me and takes my gold, he cost me time. If someone races me to resources, he costs me time. If someone kills the rare quest mob I needed for my class weapon, he costs me time. Spending a couple hours regaining equipment and spending a couple hours waiting for a group to leave the camp I needed (and can’t leave myself or someone else may take it) is still a couple hours spent at the mercy of other players.
Right. I’m pretty sure it was manson who introduced the concept of sexual harassment in games, for example. And more broadly, we’d beaten the issue of the ethics of griefing in games to death, and had moved on to other, broader issues of ethics and morality in gaming. Conversations drift. That’s not a sign of weakness in one side of the argument or the other, that’s just what happens to conversations if they go on long enough.
Actually, he says that he started banditry when it became too difficult to find monsters (due to player population and limited spawns) which is essentially the same as competing for resource nodes. In fact, that’s a common point players make about liking PVP servers – if you’re fighting for a spawn of some sort, it’s easy to decisively solve the disagreement.
Again, the real issue there was developer choices (not enough spawns to keep players engaged) rather than players using the game functions.
True. That doesn’t mean it would have been okay for me to punch the shit out of someone to take a table, though–or even to engage in a shouting match–because this sort of indirect competition for limited resources is different in kind from a zero-sum-game deliberate conflict.
Yes–but he was “stealing” (in quotes in case manson thinks I believe it was actually a felony committed) from players who had already “killed monsters” to “gather treasure.” I’m stopping with the quotes now because they’re annoying. It’s not the same as competing for resource nodes at all, because
a) the banditry wouldn’t be possible if everyone was doing it; and
b) a competition for resource nodes necessarily involves an agreement from everyone to participate–someone who doesn’t want to compete for resource nodes just doesn’t go for them. The banditry did not involve the consensual agreement of all parties to participate.
Sure, that’s real life. This is a game where, by explicit design, engaging in combat is a valid option.
(a) Irrelevant. Killing monsters for loot isn’t possible if everyone is doing it either, as evidenced by the fact that there simply wasn’t enough monsters in UO to keep the player population engaged. If you have one iron ore node and 300 people then blacksmithing isn’t possible if everyone is doing it. Also, as previously pointed out, this is kind of a silly argument since you don’t have situations where “everyone” is doing one thing. Even on PVP servers, people don’t exclusively run around killing one another.
(b) The competition for resources isn’t consensual except that I can’t stop the other guy from doing it. If it were up to me, everyone would stay out of the dungeons I wanted to explore, away from the mobs I want to kill and keep their hands off my iron ore. But it isn’t up to me and saying “Well, just don’t go for them if you don’t want to compete” is the same as telling someone who doesn’t want to risk being stabbed “Well, just never leave the town if you don’t want to get stabbed”. Competition is an innate part of MMORPG worlds and you agree to it simply by virtue of playing the game.
The key distinction there is that you want other people to not play the game you want to play. This is different from bump’s situation, where he was forcing people to play a game they did not want to play.
If a game is advertised as containing a particular style of play and the game heavily supports that style of play its no one’s fault, ethically speaking, that the game doesn’t meet your expectations or requirements. PvP was not a hack, was not a surprise, was not unintended. It was an integral part of the game regardless of your desire for the game to be something else. Miller did the proper thing, for him or her, and quit. I continued to play but I made my displeasure concerning the inadequacy of the incentive implementation known. You want it to be a peaceful sandbox. That’s not what it is.
Furthermore, real life analogies fail because many games allow and encourage behavior that just doesn’t fly in the real world.
By willingly paying to play a non-essential game that knowingly features free for all PvP you’ve consented. If you didn’t know what you bought those attacking you have no way of knowing that you didn’t know. All they can assume is that you are willingly participating a game that features free for all PvP. There is nothing inherently unethical for them to attack your character with officially sanctioned methods.