'Twixt'? Anyone remember this guy?

Wait, so is study is that people hate griefers? I sure hope no tax payers money helped to fund this study. Seriously, it be like, when I slap most people, they get angry.

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This is a service-oriented business, and it's all
about keeping the player happy over the long term.
So you have to listen and pay attention. If a large
portion of your playerbase is screaming about
some change, you be wise to listen. - Raph Koster

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So he used a live commercial MMO to conduct "experiments" on other people?

Well then, I'm sure he remembered to gather the needed written permissions from not only NCSoft, but also from all people involved in these "experiments". I mean, otherwise he'd leave himself open for all sorts of nasty ethics complaints. Or worse. But as a professor, I don't need to tell him things like that, I'm just a lowly Master of Arts, and even I knew not to do anything that would get the university in trouble.

So it would be extremely sad if someone with grounds for en ethics complaint were to contact his university to make said complaint. Especially in writing. But I'm sure he's been careful and only killed the avatars of people who already agreed to be a part of the "experiment". It's just good ethics to do so.

Sorry, can't keep that level of sarcasm up...

Anyway, if you feel you've been mistreated by these "experiments", and feel vindictive, contact the university directly and complain. Even better if a group of people make a joint complaint. When entering a PVP Zone you agree to getting attacked and killed, but I don't see anywhere in the EULA of agreeing to be part of scientific "experiments". Actually, I don't see anything in the EULA about allowing people to conduct experiments on other players either.

So if you really want to cause trouble, don't just refute his paper, do an ethics complaint as well. I can't be part of it, though, didn't PVP when he was active. But if his "experiment" affected you negatively and you didn't agree to being used as a guinea pig, then you're in the clear for a complaint. Best if you have some data to back it up with, of course, but you don't have to follow the scientific method in a complaint. He, on the other hand, must in his paper.

[/ QUOTE ] Yeah!! Being vindictive will show him!

Actually, by suggesting this you at least as bad as him.

[/ QUOTE ]There is a reason these methods are in place Munki. There is nothing wrong to holding someone to the standards of their peers in the professional world. Next you are going to tell us all the groups who sent that former anti game lawyer cease and desist letters when he said he was supported by their organization were wrong.

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As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules -- disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular.

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http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2...fessor_be.html

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sigh yeah i remember twixt ,was good times back then.

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depends on where you slap them.

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Ignoring anyone is a mistake. You might miss something viral to your cause.

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So he used a live commercial MMO to conduct "experiments" on other people?

Well then, I'm sure he remembered to gather the needed written permissions from not only NCSoft, but also from all people involved in these "experiments". I mean, otherwise he'd leave himself open for all sorts of nasty ethics complaints. Or worse. But as a professor, I don't need to tell him things like that, I'm just a lowly Master of Arts, and even I knew not to do anything that would get the university in trouble.

So it would be extremely sad if someone with grounds for en ethics complaint were to contact his university to make said complaint. Especially in writing. But I'm sure he's been careful and only killed the avatars of people who already agreed to be a part of the "experiment". It's just good ethics to do so.

Sorry, can't keep that level of sarcasm up...

Anyway, if you feel you've been mistreated by these "experiments", and feel vindictive, contact the university directly and complain. Even better if a group of people make a joint complaint. When entering a PVP Zone you agree to getting attacked and killed, but I don't see anywhere in the EULA of agreeing to be part of scientific "experiments". Actually, I don't see anything in the EULA about allowing people to conduct experiments on other players either.

So if you really want to cause trouble, don't just refute his paper, do an ethics complaint as well. I can't be part of it, though, didn't PVP when he was active. But if his "experiment" affected you negatively and you didn't agree to being used as a guinea pig, then you're in the clear for a complaint. Best if you have some data to back it up with, of course, but you don't have to follow the scientific method in a complaint. He, on the other hand, must in his paper.

[/ QUOTE ] Yeah!! Being vindictive will show him!

Actually, by suggesting this you at least as bad as him.

[/ QUOTE ]There is a reason these methods are in place Munki. There is nothing wrong to holding someone to the standards of their peers in the professional world. Next you are going to tell us all the groups who sent that former anti game lawyer cease and desist letters when he said he was supported by their organization were wrong.

[/ QUOTE ] You're right, there is nothing wrong with holding people to certain standards. But if being vindictive is a motive(like the person said), then you(general) are no better than Twixt.

People's motives for doing stuff speak about a person's character.

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Hmmmmm... not being into PvP, nope, can't say I know who he is. Although if I'd known that MMO research would get me my PhD, I'd have done it a lot sooner. Something tells me I could probably write one hell of a sociology paper on this game, on topics far less controversial.

These could include:
1) Which gender do men play vs women play?
2) Are heroes or villains more prevalent?
3) Are players more likely to get a hero to 50 or a villain to 50?
4) For those players in serious, commited relationships, how has the game affected the relationship? For those players who are in relationships with other players, is the game a 'bonding' experience or does its competition foster resentment in the relationship?
5) What are the three predominant reasons that players play CoH/CoV?

Hmmmmmmm... well, if I do end up going back to school in 2010 (and yes, it IS for my PhD), I may use CoH as my research ground...

I'll be at the University, working on my Professor day job badge.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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I did and still do farm in RV with a heavy by killing npc's and have done for years. One day Twixt happened across me and in typical Twixt fashion didn't like that there was someone in the zone that either didn't like him or was actively trying to kill him. So as I was farming he gathered a whole herd of enemy npc's together and then dragged them over to where I was to try and get me killed. When that didn't work he started saying in Broadcast to anyone that would listen that I was talking smack about all the villains in the zone and he gave them my location and encouraged them to gank me as often as possible.

He was/is an instigator and instead of being an impartial observer which is what a good sociology majour would do he instead CREATES controversy and a negative atmosphere and then steps back and watches the carnage he has created. Such a blatant case of manipulation which would blow any data he might collect out of the water on the grounds it's tainted data. When it comes down to it he was just a sad and lonely guy looking for attention and went out of his way to cause trouble and then hide behind the flimsy excuse of professional research to justify his own despicable actions. The best thing to do with him and anyone like him is what I did in game. You just /ignore and go about your daily routine. Deprived of attention people like him get bored and frustrated that no one is paying any attention to him and he'll leave.

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[IMG]http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2886/coxboardsig.jpg[/IMG][B][SIZE="3"]
The shining world of the seven systems. On the continent of Wild Endeavour. In the mountains of Solace and Solitude there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords. The oldest and most mightiest race in the Universe. Sworn never to interfere. Only watch...[/SIZE][/B]

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I befriended him. He was hilarious on teams.

"Hey, watch this."

Then the 10 minute [censored] storm comes up. We lol and repeat it. God I love people who love to get rises out of people.

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Don't have a dog in this fight (rarely PvP and these days only Arena stuff with friends and never was on any of the three servers mentioned in his paper), but quoting page 9 from the professors paper:

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These three sets of behaviors – rigidly competitive pvp tactics (e. g., droning), steadfastly uncooperative social play outside the game context (e. g., refusing to cooperate with zone farmers), and steadfastly uncooperative social play within the game context (e. g., [color= orange]playing solo and refusing team invitations[/color]) – marked Twixt’s play from the play of all others within RV.

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If the quote from Yosef_Vanya is truthful and as it implies Twixt actually did team with other heroes while engaging in "competitive play," does that mean he cherry picked and falsified his research?

When one conducts experiments like this, as they perfect their methods and evolve their "persona", when do you start the data recording device? To me, this seems more like a bit of social sculpture and performative conceptual art ala the early work of Vito Acconci rather than scientific documentation of the "griefing phenomenon." Both have their merits... but they rarely are ever one in the same.

To be honest, I find this work much less insightful than another forumites link to what I think was their own undergraduate level work hypothesizing that autistics thrive while psycho-normals struggle in computer driven environments where social cues are massively truncated to text and a few rigid emotes.

There is something familiar about the questionable nature of his research and even how he went about getting into the subject. I had several profs both in grad and undergrad that were total hacks, even with tenure, doing half-finished work in meager attempts to validate their position. This sloppy work usually seemed to happen after their passion for either teaching or their own work had faded and been transposed by another obsession. For one it was wood bottom boats, for another it was getting bit parts in bad indie films, and yet another simply got into being a parent. At the time, as a passionate and dedicated student, I couldn't understand how someone lucky enough to be a professor could "lose their way." Now with a decade or two more under my belt, I have a bit more compassion for those whose interests have waxed and waned.

But then there were other professors at university who would get lost in addictive and compulsive behaviours and struggle to find some means to justify the hours they spent engaging things like pornography, psychoactive drugs or violent imagery. Labeling this behaviour as "study," "work," and "research" is one short route to justification for less than ethical academes. For this professor, his passion seems to have been, for at least a time, actively griefing others in a game he had become bored with. (He indicates how boring he found PvE in his paper a couple times.) Mostly, this academic work feels a little like a rationalization for indulging his own antisocial impulses with abandon. That doesn't say that valuable knowledge never comes from looking closely at topics many of us find unworthy of serious or costly investigation, but this doesn't seem like one such breakthru moment. (Hunter S. Thompson you are not, sir!) More of a scholastic belly flop if you ask me.

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autistics thrive while psycho-normals struggle in computer driven environments where social cues are massively truncated to text and a few rigid emotes.


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Have you been reading my diary???

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autistics thrive while psycho-normals struggle in computer driven environments where social cues are massively truncated to text and a few rigid emotes.


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Have you been reading my diary???

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I only look at the pictures on account of my own disorders. Hope you don't mind. You're a good drawer. I mean with a ballpoint pen. Not with socks and briefs stuffed in you.

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If he's the type of lazy "professional academic" he appears to be, he really has nothing to be proud of. But then again, he's locked into a profession that's "Publish or Perish". Even if his research methods are sloppy and suspect, he's still got to put out an attempt at a paper.

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That doesn't actually fly. He's a full professor. He could never publish anything again and be fine.

This is academic grandstanding, pure and simple.

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So, for being the sort of researcher he is, having picked the lifestyle he has, and the sort of player he was, he deserves no more than a tiny modicum pity.

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I wouldn't even grant him that. The actual paper is a disturbing read - not because of how people reacted to his intentional norm violations (he also liked to disrupt in-zone duels, among other things), but because things he describes as Twixt's reactions or perceptions could only have been Dr. Myer's perceptions. Twixt never had to deal with a flood of tells that made playing the game so difficult he had to close his chat window - Dr. Myers did. I'm sure that's some sort of sociological/ethnomethodological thing that I, as a psychologist, would know nothing about - I just find it disturbing when people describe things that were clearly their own perceptions from the perspective of an imaginary character, and do so in scholarly writing.

I'm unimpressed. The ability to push people's buttons is neither new nor interesting. Violating ("breaching") social norms repeatedly and belligerently leads to ostracism.

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My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.

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autistics thrive while psycho-normals struggle in computer driven environments where social cues are massively truncated to text and a few rigid emotes.


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Have you been reading my diary???

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I only look at the pictures on account of my own disorders. Hope you don't mind. You're a good drawer. I mean with a ballpoint pen. Not with socks and briefs stuffed in you.

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O RLY?

u liek mai drawringz?

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autistics thrive while psycho-normals struggle in computer driven environments where social cues are massively truncated to text and a few rigid emotes.


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Have you been reading my diary???

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I only look at the pictures on account of my own disorders. Hope you don't mind. You're a good drawer. I mean with a ballpoint pen. Not with socks and briefs stuffed in you.

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O RLY?

u liek mai drawringz?

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Yes. They bring me a strangely sublime inner peace.

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Cool, one less PVP'er.

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QFT

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Never heard of him, some of the stuff in this article about the guy is pretty stupid, but still, what some people did to him was TOTALY uncalled for. He actualy PvPed in a PvP zone. ZOMG NO WAI!!! I gotta agree, teleporting them infront of the malta bots is pretty cheap, but hey, the goal is to defeat the enemy no matter the cost, so I really cant fault him there.

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I thought he was TPing in front of police/arachnos drones.

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+ Longbow/Heavies.

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Never heard of him, some of the stuff in this article about the guy is pretty stupid, but still, what some people did to him was TOTALY uncalled for. He actualy PvPed in a PvP zone. ZOMG NO WAI!!! I gotta agree, teleporting them infront of the malta bots is pretty cheap, but hey, the goal is to defeat the enemy no matter the cost, so I really cant fault him there.

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Actually, PvP zones have goals, having a drone/npc defeat someone doesn't meet a single one of them. Moreover, the Devs have stated that intentionally causing xp debt is harassment and against the TOS. Doesn't engaging in an "illegal" activity negate the entire point of his 'paper'?

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Interesting thing to note, if you read through his blog entries.

In January (after his "I'm leaving CoH" entry), he was giving advice for low-level characters to explore PvP zones, and offered to give a million inf to anyone who started a character and needed cash. He even gave out a global address at which he could be contacted.

So it sounds very much like Twixt may not be as gone as advertised, and further that he may have created a bunch of "disciples" (read: students) to keep breaching norms in PvP zones.

Link

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My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.

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Never heard of him, some of the stuff in this article about the guy is pretty stupid, but still, what some people did to him was TOTALY uncalled for. He actualy PvPed in a PvP zone. ZOMG NO WAI!!! I gotta agree, teleporting them infront of the malta bots is pretty cheap, but hey, the goal is to defeat the enemy no matter the cost, so I really cant fault him there.

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Actually, PvP zones have goals, having a drone/npc defeat someone doesn't meet a single one of them. Moreover, the Devs have stated that intentionally causing xp debt is harassment and against the TOS. Doesn't engaging in an "illegal" activity negate the entire point of his 'paper'?

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I've been wondering that as well. Still trying to think of an analogy.

Maybe it's like playing a board game with a child who insists that they get to do whatever they want with the game pieces in order to achieve arrangement that constitutes a "win" for them. He writes about natural law versus social law. The natural law for a board game and the marbles, chits and any other pieces involved would be physics. Where can matter move? The social laws would be both the universally accepted rules of the game as well as any subsets of "house rules" folks already play by.

Who wants to keep playing checkers with a seven year old who keeps insisting, "On my fifth turn, I get two turns. And on my sixth turn all my normal checkers are kings, okay?" As the psychologist above points out: the fact that breaching antagonizes people is nothing new.

I'm not convinced that his interpretation of natural versus social law as they metaphorically manifest in CoH/V is entirely accurate. i.e. Isn't the EULA just a deeper extension of social law? If he could write a virus that blows up his opponents mother boards and also tells the servers to give him a zillion points, wouldn't that still be within the limits of natural law for PvP? But instead he followed the EULA, he didn't seek out any additional programs to help him "cheat" even further according to the predominant set of social laws.

Lastly, his record of the social phenomenon that seem to be at the heart of his research is very fragmentary. One can much more easily record chat logs. Why the highly selective citation of crescendo moments of folks ganging up on him? Why not share with his colleagues the full pattern of emergence of these relationships? The full chat transcripts? Could it be that there are chat lines in there that go against the thesis he works to prove? Or perhaps they just reflect poorly on him as a person so he prefers to leave those bits out.

And again, when folks take this gonzo immersive approach to investigating life, IMO it crosses the line from science into art as the observer becomes an instigator inseparable from the observed. And if he's making art, then let it all out man. Incriminate yourself. Leave nothing behind and go for broke. "My two years as a PvP griefer" may have been a much more interesting read to be honest!

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O RLY?

u liek mai drawringz?

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This made my night.

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Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed

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Seriously, it be like, when I slap most people, they get angry.

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To be fair, it was PvP, so it's more like a group of people who all agree to slap and get slapped by each other.

Twixt just brought a paddle to the slapfight, that's all - not officially against the rules at the time, but not something his targets looked at with joy.

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I bet the majority of the people e-raging were farmers and fiteklubbers.

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I love that the PvP forums have completely ignored this.

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He actually posted his goodbye and a link in the PvP forums some time ago.

Old news is old.

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Elec/Cold Troller AV/Pylon/GM/TF/SF Soloing Antics
everytime...he gets me everytime.... DAMN U BOOMIE -- _Ilr_
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

ROFL THIS THREAD IS AMAZING!

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Moreover, the Devs have stated that intentionally causing xp debt is harassment and against the TOS. Doesn't engaging in an "illegal" activity negate the entire point of his 'paper'?

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Think hard my friend. Really think hard. Better yet do some research.



LOL THIS COMMUNITY IS SO FUNNY. IT IS AMAZING HOW LITTLE MOST OF YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS GAME AND THE MECHANICS. ALL THESE THEORIES BEING MADE UP ABOUT TWIXT, IT'S LIKE A SOAP OPERA HERE. I'M SO LOVING THIS CoX DRAMA QUEEN EPISODE!

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A very sad story about War Witch and the neglected kitty. http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219670