Doesn’t matter. The same currency, time, is being expended in both cases. Time spent waiting to be able to access a resource is no less valuable than time spent collecting gold to make up for what someone looted from me. Time is, after all, what people are upset about, right? Maybe your pride is hurt a little by losing but mainly you don’t like the idea that you have to regain experience points or collect new gold/gear or start traveling again from wherever you respawned.
Also, bump wasn’t forcing people to “play a game they didn’t want to play”. The game was UO which included, by deliberate design, PVP. What you mean is, bump was playing UO while others sulked and said they wish the game was designed differently and so you shouldn’t use any game functions they don’t like.
Failing to justify your own position while trying to mix up the opposing position with a different set of issues does show that your position is weak. You have utterly failed to explain in what way it’s unethical to play a game by the rules of the game as shown through game mechanics and the rules and statements of the people who run the game. Or to explain why your personal preference for how a game should be overrides the desires of other players and (especially) the people creating and running the game.
Again, calling people ‘unethical’ for playing a game by the rules of the game is completely absurd and unjustified, even if you wish the game had a different set of rules.
It does matter, because the currency we’re talking about here isn’t time, it’s consent. Nobody wanted to play bandit with bump. bump didn’t care. That’s unethical. It’s unethical (don’t panic, here, Pantastic: I’m about to make an analogy, and I know those throw you) in precisely the same way that sexually harassing another player in a game is unethical, even if the game mechanics and apathetic GMs allow it.
The “others” being the overwhelming majority of the other people who were paying for the game. At a certain point, “The game let’s me do it!” stops being an effective explanation, and starts being a justification for antisocial behavior.
No, it’s not. Not any more than taking a camp, node, raid mob, etc without my consent is unethical. Both cost me time, nothing more and nothing less. My minutes spent recovering from one thing are no different than my minutes spent recovering from something else. And, as pointed out continually, you’re consenting to PVP by virtue of logging into and playing a game that has a PVP component. If you don’t want to play a game by its rules then don’t play the game. Those who do choose to play a game by its rules aren’t being unethical just because you (or a supposed hundred yous) don’t like it.
The game that allowed for PVP, right? The one that had PVP programmed into it intentionally as a valid choice for player action? At a certain point, “He killed me in this PVP game and I didn’t want him to so he’s an unethical meanie-jerkhead” becomes just whining. That point is… well, immediately since you’re playing a PVP game. Now, it would be wise for the developers at this point to make modifications to keep the money rolling in but that’s neither here nor there regarding the ethics of the PVP player base.
I feel that putting unethicality at the level of direct sexual harrassment is a bit too far. Instead I feel it is “unethical” on a similar level to people sitting down to play checkers, but one person is placing down chess pieces on the same board and playing by chess rules. Certainly the board (game world) allows for either game to be played, and even with mutual consent both checkers and chess could be played at the same time against each other, but it is the unethicality of being a selfish jerk (wants to gain joy from ursurping the community’s pre-agreed upon rules, and forcing his own playstyle against the others’ consent) rather than the unethicality of being a criminal
No it’s not even that unethical. It’s as unethical as agreeing and paying to play a voluntary game that has a known set of rules and than playing by those rules. Harassing language even though a chat client may display the words is generally explicitly forbidden in the terms of use. PvP in UO was intended.
The debate over the morality of playing by the explicit intent of the game’s rules is really about a sense of entitlement. Some people feel entitled to unspoken rules of conduct that are in complete contradiction to the stated rules of the game. If I agree to play a game of chess I can’t complain based on a violation of ethics that my opponent castles. If I agree to play WoW I can’t complain based on a violation of ethics that someone killed me in an instances battleground or if I get corpse camped on a PvP server.
It was clearly not intended in the way that bump engaged in it–he had to find a workaround to make his approach viable.
“Entitled” is a dumb fuckin word to use for this, but your basic idea–that I expect people to behave better than the bare minimum that will preclude being kicked out of a public space–is correct. When I’m at a park, even though the law permits someone to shout “WHORE” at women wearing sleeveless dresses, I don’t want them to do so. When I’m at a restaurant, even though someone might be able to talk about their poop in a loud voice, I expect them not to. When I’m in a MMORPG that’s designed to accommodate multiple styles of play, even though someone might get away with turning the entire game into a PVP-fest because nothing else remains viable because of their behavior, I expect them not to.
At this point, however, I’m not seeing anyone–you, Jophiel, pantastic, nobody–addressing these points, so I’m not sure there’s much point to continuing.
You’re free to reject it. That and fifty cents will buy you a cup of coffee when someone is attacking you in a PVP game that you’re playing. By playing a game that features PVP, you’re accepting that PVP may happen. Otherwise, it’s like joining a paintball game and then declaring that no one can shoot you because you only came to pick flowers during the match.
There’s no point in addressing it because your comparison has little to do with the reality of the game. Playing a game according to its designed rules isn’t comparable to shouting “whore” at women in a park. As previously explained, UO isn’t a public space. It was a private space you paid to access and it you knew what that space entailed. If you went to a paid park with a sign at the gate declaring “Call people whores!” as a feature and still paid to enter, you’d be a fool for acting insulted that someone yelled “whore”.
Given that UO didn’t have a sign saying, “Waylay people by the side of the road and kill them to take their stuff!” that’s not a good analogy. UO functioned very similarly to a park (say, The Grand Canyon) that has an entrance fee and in which the first amendment held sway: the rules allowed for a particular behavior, but that doesn’t mean you’re ethically free to engage in that behavior when you know someone else doesn’t want you to.
Or imagine someone going into another semi-public space like Disney World. Sure, you can shout terrible things at people in the park, but the guards there will accost you, just like the guards in UO accosted PKers. BUt wait! You realize that if you put on a Disney costume, the guards are going to have trouble finding you, just like the guards in UO had trouble finding you if you played through an alt. Hey presto, you’ve found a workaround to avoid consequences, and suddenly your unethical behavior is ethical! Cool!
It did, however, clearly have PVP as an intentional and deliberate function of the game. Parks do not typically have “Shout whore!” as a deliberate function of the park. At some point, the developers said “Hey, we want people to be able to fight and kill one another in this game” and took intentional steps to make it happen. They even included a mechanism to loot dead players showing that they did expect people to kill and steal.
Find me the park where shouting mean things at people is part of the park’s deliberate design and your analogy will deserve some sort of examination. As is, it’s pretty flawed.
Bump’s use of alts for selling stuff is irrelevant unless your argument is that using alts is the unethical behavior. Bump could kill you with or without selling your stuff later. Are you implying that you’d only get mad at someone killing you if he’s using an alt to sell his loot? Because I thought the actual PVP was the issue here.
Free speech is a deliberate function of a park, just like PVP is a function of UO. Shouting terrible things at people is a lousy way to use free speech, just as killing random non-PVPers is a lousy way to use PVP functionality.
Good metaphor. The phone system is explicitly set up to allow you to call people and to take calls. You consented to receiving calls when you got a phone. Why on earth would anyone complain when telemarketers call them? They’re just whining because they think they should have a special exemption from the rules!
Well, yeah. That’s why I don’t throw hissy fits or blow whistles into the phone or go on long tirades when someone calls me. I just say “Thanks, not interested” and hang up.
I guess if you’re the sort of person who gets all worked up over phone calls, I can understand how you’d get all worked up over PVP in a PVP game but that doesn’t make telemarketers or PVP game players unethical.
A park is run by the national government, which set up the first amendment most especially to protect speech in public spaces. So yes, it really is. It is deliberate that people can go to a park and exercise their first amendment rights.
Parks aren’t created with the intent of people exercising free speech. They’re made to preserve nature or give people pleasant places to visit, etc. For example, here is the act creating our first national park, Yellowstone. Please quote for me the part about free speech? I’ll save you the time – it’s not there. You can not honestly say that parks are deliberately created as venues for free speech. People exercising free speech at parks is more a function of the 1st Amendment taking precedence regardless of the park’s intent.
In simpler terms: Telemarketers are not unethical simply for calling my phone even if I didn’t want my phone to ring right then. Game players are not unethical for engaging in PVP even if you didn’t want to engage in PVP right then.
This comes to a fundamental disagreement, then, and I think it’s along these lines: just because the rules allow you to do something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ethical to do it. Other factors may come into play.
Good metaphor. The phone system is explicitly set up to allow you to call people and to take calls. You consented to receiving calls when you got a phone. Why on earth would anyone complain when telemarketers call them? They’re just whining because they think they should have a special exemption from the rules!