Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

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Of course. As time goes by and online games become omni-present, along with the profits, social responsibility increases too.

I would expect the developer to patch the server/software instead of killing the character for all to see. If the player is a 14 year old Italian, living in Napoli for instance (where the mob is stronger then the state) he just learned about a code of conduct that might stuck there throughout his lifespan leading to some seriously fucked up situations (because real world crime repercussions are different). Some people are seriously hooked up in online gaming. Some of them are kids for Christ's sake.

What this company did here is plainly ridiculous. You don't respond to bullies with bullying if you don't want to promote violence. If you respond violently (by humiliating your opponent) you are effectively promoting violence and unethical behaviour, although indirectly.

Closing the account and making a statement would be more than enough. What I see here, is just an 'ego' hurt... But the developer's and/or security-whatever-officer's ego should be feeling more for the 'problem' than the 'messenger'...

Well... it's a tricky one. It's a game, right? I credit gamers on the whole with the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Since the whole narrative of the game is combat in the first place, with thousands of virtual deaths per hour, you could say it's appropriate in context. It's also arguably more fun - and that's why people play.

>I credit gamers on the whole with the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

This is somewhat tangential, but research on the influence of video games on behavior has been showing that games can and do indeed have measurable effects on behavior and mood. It's quantifiable; it's certainly not as strong as Jack Thompson (woah, nostalgia) would want you to believe, but it's there. From what I understand, the long-standing rejection of this idea by gamers is a consequence of cognitive dissonance.

http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/01/22/014616721352... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103113...

If it's qunantifiable, then we know how big it is, then we know how big it isn't and are not justified in invoking video games as an explanation for all human misbehavior by people who have played video games, just the issues they actually cause.

Maybe this is where I disagree and didn't make it clear. I have no problem with banning an account. No one would even notice that this account was banned probably.

What I have problem with is the stance of the admin/dev/supervisor/whatever towards a user who fund and exploited a bug.

Humiliating publicly a game character was never in the context of the game. The character didn't lose a battle, the admin took over the account by force and eliminated the character, then he published the video for other users to see. Imagine if the death sentence in the US was not an electric chair but a Colosseum-like show with lions eating men alive, broadcasted on national TV. They were going to die anyway, so why not make up a show, use the money for ... I don't know, public education/research? :-) - would that make the action appropriate/ethical/understandable?

This is not another virtual death otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it, would we?

>Imagine if the death sentence in the US was not an electric chair but a Colosseum-like show with lions eating men alive, broadcasted on national TV.

Except this isn't real death. It's a game! The fact that you're having so much difficulty distinguishing between the two is a little worrisome.

I'm ready to be held accountable for what I write and say. But under no circumstances am I to held accountable for your poor understanding...

>This is not another virtual death otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it, would we?

We're talking about it now because someone in the media reported it. Sometimes importance is an effect of media reporting rather than a cause.

we are talking about this one for the same reason some thefts in eve get media attention and others do not. They decided to send a press release out.

But, it was a nice job equating virtual pixels with real life death. Do you have similar views regarding the fact that I just had to torture an NPC with an electronic prod?

Although the video going viral is a bit much, in general, I'd view the humiliation as potentially giving a positive lesson to a 14-year-old. Griefing (which I'd call obvious cheating a form of, though I don't play GW2 and don't know the exact circumstances here) is a really uniquely digital phenomenon, because you can go around pissing people off and laughing about it without any real consequences - at worst your account gets banned, and you can go make a new one - and with the separation of anonymity and limited chat tools making it easy to mentally dehumanize your targets. Now, to some extent I think griefing can be funny, especially if honed to an art like in those YouTube videos; in the majority of games where the consequences of dealing with a griefer are little more than a few minutes' irritation, the people who get most annoyed sometimes need to chill out and remember they're just playing a video game. But it also gives the griefer a power trip in exchange for behavior that would be pretty anti-social if applied in the real world. By making the griefer encounter a form of social judgement for their actions, rather than just a faceless "you are banned" screen, they're giving them a taste of reality.

Also, there's no such thing as bad press. The player in question is now infamous for this video, which I bet they see as a silver lining at worst; more ego-boosting than the hacks themselves at best.

(I say this as someone who, in my early teens, was on the receiving end of a banhammer or two on sites I really cared about; I probably remember these instances relatively well because they invoked strong negative emotions in me, which I guess isn't good, but they also made me introspect and resolve to be more mature in the future. Never cheated in video games though.)

>> You don't respond to bullies with bullying if you don't want to promote violence.

err... its a game where violence is the norm right.. or am I mistaken?

If you're playing a game like Guild Wars it's probably because you are already entertained by fantasy violence and skulduggery. I actually think this is a healthy thing, insofar as it shows the character getting punished within the context of the game mechanics. Just blocking the account or whatever is arguably rather like the way we treat people with prison - sending them away to a place where we don't have to look at the consequences. If videogames do inform attitudes and behavior - and I find that thesis questionable - than doing the punishment out of sight arguably teaches people that the appropriate response to social problems is to make the offending parties disappear.

I don't think that having your account taken over by the admin is in the context of game mechanics.

The player gave up their rights to the account by cheating.

The admin can do whatever they want with abandoned property.

The player never had rights to their account, they were merely temporarily permitted access to it by licence. It has been owned by the game since the start.

> What I see here, is just an 'ego' hurt...

It's about customer retention. I personally know a bunch of people who have quit games because of cheaters. I personally quit GW2 due to a flyhacker. By humiliating the cheater the developer has appeased the person who's day they ruined, potentially preventing them from uninstalling the game and never returning.

The developer effectively put power back into the hands of the thousands of people who were cheated by that one person.

I could easily make the opposite argument: "by showing a childish and irresponsible behaviour he alienated many current and new users."

It would be an interesting conversation but without data to back up each claim, we're just writing a romance here.

I tend to agree with the violence does not solve violence idea, but perhaps putting the player character into jail (a simple inescapable room should be ten lines of code?) would be a better punishment - and I suspect we shall see that soon as you rightly say online worlds become more perm and t

Jails exist in Minecraft communities.

Some of them are just inescapable boxes; some of them look like jails; some are combinations of parkour and slow-blocks ("soulsand" and cobwebs, for example) so that the player can escape, it just takes skill and time to do so.

Because players can build them, but most other games need the "owner" to change the rules of the game. Gosh democracy, freedom, openness ... It's almost as if we just had an election:-)

Of course that would be much more appropriate and wouldn't give the sense of a Dues Ex Machina.

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