The rules don’t just say “it’s okay”. This isn’t a loophole that you’re rules-lawyering like kill stealing or monopolizing spawns/resources, this is a specific feature of the game. The “rules” actively say “Yes, you can go stab anyone because we made a game in which stabbing people is an intentional function of how we want the game to be played.” Obviously the other person doesn’t want to be stabbed – that’s what makes it “combat”.
People who didn’t like that were playing the wrong game. Shame that their gaming options were limited but those were the breaks.
Yeah, I hate when going on the Bumper cars at an Amusement Park, and I just want to drive around the perimeter pretending I’m on a country drive, and people keep bumping into me. Those people are jerks! :rolleyes:
Also, online computer games aren’t real, real life standards of morals and ethics don’t apply.
Yeah, I understand the rules. When I argue, “Just because the rules allow you to be a dick, doesn’t make it okay to be a dick,” explaining the rules to me again isn’t actually a rebuttal.
If you think there are conditions or circumstances where moral or ethics don’t apply, you do not have a very good grasp on either.
I played UO at or near the beginning on Europa shard. PvP was very much intended behavior. What the developers didn’t understand was how creative the pk’er population would be and how unpopular that non-consensual PvP with no real consequences due to multiple character per account and multiple accounts per certain players would be. The developers at the time didn’t understand incentives. Developers now, for the most part, are much wiser and clear.
Some pk’ers were real life jerks imo. Others were not. The funny thing is i hated them all at the time. Now I miss those days. In retrospect they made the game exciting.
That’s it in a nutshell. People are carving out a special exception to social norms for a MMORPG. While the social norms are superficially modified–in a MMORPG it’s okay to walk around town with a giant weapon, for example–the underlying norms don’t change, unless there’s a very clear agreement to that change (as is the case with an agreement to play checkers, for example), the underlying social norms don’t change.
Unilaterally changing them, and excusing your behavior that’s plainly irritating a lot of folks around you and is only possible precisely because they’re not choosing to do that behavior, is not cool.
It’s similar to those who played Street Fighter 2 and complained about being thrown. The objective is to win. A throw is an intended and legitimate move. No crying, please.
Sometimes I think people argue about what something ought to have been instead of what it was.
If you play a game in which there is free for all PvP you have implicitly agreed to participating in free for all PvP regardless of any other intent. In UO it was part of the game that it was acceptable to attack, kill, rob, and mutilate the corpse of other players. I had my head taken many times.
But that’s not the argument. The argument is, “If you’re doing something, and very nearly every single person you do it to says, “Don’t do that,” then you’re ethically obligated to stop doing it.” This is a general ethical axiom. It’s not context-dependent, it’s a basic component of being a decent human being. It doesn’t get relaxed because you’re playing a video game.
No, none of those things are ethically or morally questionable, because none of them involve other people. Ethics and morality govern our interactions with other humans, and apply to all interactions with other humans, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. If there are no other humans involved in a particular action, the action cannot be unethical or immoral.
Exactly. I think there may be a misconception of just how FEW actual monsters there were. It wasn’t a situation of not killing enough monsters to progress at the rate we desired. It was a situation of roaming the wilderness/dungeons for a couple of hours a night, and if we were lucky, finding one monster to kill each night. And not something tough that might take a couple of player characters to kill; it was usually lame animals just cruising around.
So we did exactly what **Lemur866 **said- we became monsters. And not random asshole monsters, but rather we tried to play a specific in-game role; that of bandits or highwaymen or whatever you want to call them.
no, but yelling racial slurs at other players is morally questionable. Teamkilling in counterstrike is morally questionable. Trapping your team in the starting area in TF2 is morally questionable.
There is difference in video game ethics, in that there are a lot of cases where you are “supposed” to pvp. You aren’t a jerk using a blue shell in mario kart, because that’s a case where pvp is the point. In counterstrike, you aren’t a jerk for pvping the enemy, but you are if you pvp your own team, because the game is supposed to be about pvping the enemy. MMORPGs are a middle ground, because some people play them wanting to pvp, and some people play them not wanting to pvp. Modern MMORPGs have separated the two groups, but UO didn’t.
I’m not sure where I fall about UO, since Pvper’s pvping non-pvpers makes non-pvpers play a game they don’t want to, but without an in-game way to separate the two groups, I’m not sure if there’s a way to let Pvpers pvp without involving non-pvpers. Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers
That may be, but that wasn’t the statement made to me. However, I don’t find using in-game mechanics to do things is ever morally or ethically questionable. it’s a game, it’s not real life. It’s made up stuff in a made up world.
Again, did the majority of the people you were “roleplaying” with want to roleplay with you? Or were the majority of them sick of being ganked by PvPers every time they left the town? Because if it’s the latter, none of the details you’ve just added make a difference. You were actively ruining the game experience for most of the people you interacted with, you knew you were doing that, and you kept doing it anyway. There’s no way to dress that up to make it okay.
Um… no. That’s a completely insane version of ethics, where you magically become unethical by entering a chess tournament and capturing pieces if the other people say ‘don’t do that’. There is NOTHING unethical about playing a game by the rules of the game, the idea that a person is a ‘dick’ for playing a game by the rules as written, intended, enforced by code, and endorsed by the game owners has absolutely no basis in reality.
Disagree. The developers set the rules to the game. If you’re playing within the rules both implicitly and explicitly (i.e., not exploiting and saying “but the game lets me!”) then random people don’t get to set new rules based on their whims and declare you a jerk for not catering to them. The standards of conduct are set by the framework of the game and you’re not a jerk or dick or unethical for playing within them even if someone else pouts about it.
Again, by its very nature combat usually involves someone who would like it to stop. By your standard, each person losing a contest should just call a time out and if the other guy doesn’t cease his attack, he’s a dick. If I get ten friends to join a FPS and we demand that the other two people stop shooting us, they’re not being unethical for shooting us anyway despite “nearly every person saying don’t do that”. It’s a game, it has rules and if you’re playing within those rules you’re cool. If you disagree, you’re playing the wrong game.
The social norms don’t change just because it’s pretend. Killing villagers is not morally questionable–but I’m pretty sure you’ve never killed a villager in your life. What you’ve done is change a computer program’s ones to zeroes, altered the state of a bunch of logic gates. No humans were harmed in the murder of those villagers.
When you PK a bunch of toons that have actual humans behind them, the crime you’re committing isn’t murder. The “crime” is annoying people. WHICH THE RULES ALLOW, but you shouldn’t always do everything that you’re allowed to do.
You and some folks get together to playact a fight with dummies. You playact the murder of another dummy. COOL BEANS, DUDE
You and some folks get together to playact a, I dunno, fuckin dinner party with your dummies. You playact the murder of another dummy in a way that messes up the dummy for that other ventriloquist. FUCKED UP, DUDE
I hope I have clarified the matter for you. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE DUMMIES.