Video game execution watched by 325K players | Hacker News Reader

Video game execution watched by 325K players

theguardian.com

83 pointscpeterso54 comments

> This week, a player named DarkSide was caught using a cheat program to teleport into buildings, kill powerful characters and make off with all the loot.

To those familiar with Guild Wars 2, that's not remotely how Guild Wars 2 works. The hacks occurred in the World vs. World area, which is one of the designated PvP areas of the games. The hacks only bypassed player stronghold defenses via teleport, he didn't "make off with all the loot."

More info: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/wuv/Blacktide-Thi...

Note that "public executions" were also a tradition in Guild Wars 1, where the game's "god of death" killed those caught selling gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6bZSpQHxU

I don't see anything earth shattering here. Am I missing something? I thought that always happened in Guild Wars 2. And the title makes it sound like 325k people assembled online to witness the event.

Wholly uninteresting. And it's not really unique to GW2, of course. Banning after players are caught cheating happens every day in online games.

I guess the difference is normally players are simply banned and maybe a forum post lets everyone know if the player was famous, instead of an admin logging in, removing gear, suiciding and then deleting the character and then banning the account which is 100% for dramatic effect. I guess this was congenial for the 'journalist' who likes to use dramatic effect in his titles himself.

Welcome to journalism. Making a mountain out of a molehill since Citizen Kane ;)

> There are of course moral questions surrounding the use of humiliation and “execution” as a form of public punishment within virtual environments.

Is there?

Are there not moral questions surrounding humiliation in any other form?

As someone who doesn't play many video games, it seems crazy to me that anyone would find this humiliating.

Exploring that would have been a more interesting topic for an article, but that would have been hard and would have deprived the author of the ability to assert it as self-evidently true.

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?

>> 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.

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.)

> 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.

Yes. Punishment by death is not a option in many countries of the world so you should think twice before doing it in a game. However fighting and killing people is not an accepted behavior nearly anywhere so by this reasoning nobody should play those games, but we do and we realize the difference between playing and reality. That's what makes that question interesting. I did feel that execution to be different from in play killings, but exactly why? Only because years and years of training myself to think they are different? Don't know yet.

"Punishment by death is not a option in many countries of the world"

It's a videogame. Geez!

How about a videogame where kids compete in murdering their (in-game) parents while they are sleeping with kitchen knifes? Will you be totally OK with letting yours (and other) 6-12 year old kids play that? Would you sleep feeling totally safe at nights?

We're talking about "sexist" games conditioning kids that women do this and men do that, etc. How about a game conditioning kids from a young age that executions are OK, something lots of societies frown upon?

What about if you stop speculating and making stuff up?

I guess what seems strange to me is that this particular incident is drawing so much ire, when we already have hugely popular games like GTA and Call of Duty (and I'm sure many more that I'm unaware of) that feature murder as a central element of the game play.

I don't contest that video games can have an effect on people and especially children, but this just seems so tame in comparison to what else is already out there.

Yes, and that is why I've forwarded this video to Human Rights Watch.

I lost my HOME to some greedy capitalist who bought up our entire street and forced me to sell. She then built hotels only the rich could afford. I ended up bankrupt.

Please write to Human Rights Watch about my situation*

* It happened during a game of Monopoly.

I think there's an obvious practical concern, in that having 325k people watch your execution would probably be seen as an end in itself to whatever the MMORPG version of internet trolls is. So as a deterrent to cheating, this seems like it might be counter-productive.

But its pretty funny, and as a PR stunt for Guild Wars, it certainly works as intended.

There aren't. Some pixels were punished, some pixels died. Unless the person is his avatar ... but in that case there is a big hell awaiting me for playing so much GTA ...

The avatar is something he spent time on and valued. He was cheating in order to take things that others had spent time on and valued. So killing his avatar as a response to these "crimes" is equivalent to taking someones property or money as punishment for theft. I'd hope you'd agree there are moral questions about what constitutes a just and proportional response.

Same thing happens when an account is banned. The work that went into that account is lost.

Would a game with black slaves in a present day setting be OK? With white owners reffering to them as n..., et al?

It might raise some moral questions, right?

Well, in the same way slavery has been abolished in the US (well, after taking like another 100+ years for Jim Crow laws and seggregation to end in their official form), and such things leave a bad taste in people, other countries have also abolished the death penalty, and see capital punishment in a similar light...

So this is the standard question of whether some speech can be worse than other speech, which is of course true, raising the question, should we legally distinguish them, which of course, we do.

I think a game may incorporate any otherwise illegal or immoral acts without itself raising any moral questions, to the extent that we don't see the actions in the game paralleling actions the player would otherwise commit IRL. Mass murder in a video game isn't seen as soothing the yearning of millions of otherwise mass murders, so there's very little moral angst. Of course it may cross some gray line which makes it hate speech and illegal to sell in certain jurisdictions, but otherwise you are free to not buy it, or organize a boycott of it, and to a great extent this is already happening and perhaps even to some extent actually reducing the commercial market for such games.

To the extent that indie or non-profit games integrate objectionable material, policing the game is no different than policing what I write in my own journal. We do certainly regulate the sale and in extraordinary circumstances even the possession of such material.

There is slavery in the Warcraft lore, the humans enslaved the Orcs. Surely such a specific example as yours would raise serious questions, but what about the Orcs?

Well, it's always about the specifics too. After all executions are also in tons of movies and books (and perhaps games), that doesn't mean it's the same everywhere.

The (philosophical) question is one of affect. MMORPG's in particular are designed to create a strong sense of attachment between avatar and player - how else will they convince you to keep playing? While it may not seem important to an outsider, to a player, the 'expensive armor' and general appearance of a character creates a sense of attachment known only to its controlling player. As such, a traumatic break of this bond can have a corresponding psychological effect on the player. So yes - humiliating, executing, public shaming of a player can have significant effects on player and as such, we should consider the moral implications.

Millions are familiar with the less dramatic but more entertaining Lyte Smites from LoL where kids questioning their bans on the forums and professing innocence are confronted with their in game chatlogs by Riot's lead social designer Lyte (Jeff Lin).

That sounds entertaining. Can you link to some examples?

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=...

There are a lot of people in this thread who are taking about the morality of killing a character while not understanding how death is framed in the game. Things that happen when you die:

You need to WP (way point). It costs a negligible amount for most player and is instantaneous (sans load times). In towns, like in this case, it's free. They cover all maps, and are normal two minutes or so walk apart from each other. In the videos, the character would literally have been alive and where he was in less than a second at no cost.

If you're in combat when you die, you're armor will slowly break (after numerous deaths one piece eventually will). This is free to fix and not a difficult NPC to find. Aside, falling to your death when not in combat will not cause this effect.

Another point to bring up is that players are falling to their death nonstop everywhere. The game has hidden areas, "jumping puzzles" and generally encourages players to make risky jumps just for the fun of it. Seeing a player fall and die, even in the middle of a town, would go fully unnoticed unless maybe by a few who might resurrect the player on a whim.

Finally, I didn't see anything of real in game value on that account and the player only had one other low level character. I'm guessing they purchased it during the resent 75% off sale with the sole intent of hacking. Further, it was probably an alt account that the person was expecting to get banned eventually.

In other words, the videos doesn't really show in game value being destroyed or lasting damage being done as punitive cruelty. Rather, it's a just a funny twist on the normally mundane task of banning. This scares no reasonable player and, rather, actually is reassuring to know they're dealing with hackers.

http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html

>There are of course moral questions surrounding the use of humiliation and “execution” as a form of public punishment within virtual environments. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – the video of DarkSide’s demise has already been viewed by over 300,000 people, hungry for a peculiar display of gaming justice.

Really? I think if I were to ask anybody I know this question they would straight up laugh in my face.

I wouldn't be surprised if this would make players want to cheat more. "Hey hey! Look at my character! 300,000 people watched him!".

I don't really think making the ethics of an in game execution a big deal is really the right tact though. Aren't there better things to do?

If a normal player jumped off that bridge, would they also die too?

I can't tell you about that particular bridge, but you can die from falling¹. That said, I don't think it would have had any penalty, the character would just be reborn somewhere else.

¹ https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Fall_Damage.jpg

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