COM 537MMOnth Week 4: Ethics and LegalitiesOctober 17 2012

1.Housekeeping2.Lecture: Research ethics3.Discussion/group work4.Break5.Work session

http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html

Next week: Discipline as Punishment is due!

Also next week: Audio-visual data coders, send me your coding schemes!

Also also next week:We will go over how to install The Ship for our ‘class’ on Friday Nov. 2 at 6pm

Bronislaw Malinowski in his tent

Social science researcher is conventionally regarded as separate from (and superior to) “subjects”

Men’s public restrooms and MMOGs… What is the connection?

World of Warcraft Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade

Tearoom trade: a study of homosexual encounters in public places• Posed as look out for men engaging in consensual sex in public washrooms• Recorded their license plate number as they drove away Interviewed them at

their houses under false pretenses• Found that most participants were not ‘out’ & were in fact (socially

conservative) men with wives & families

Tearoom trade-offs…

• Showed how a scandalous practice was actually victimless – and that homosexual activity is not confined to people who are openly queer

• Studied people without their knowledge and consent

The report mandates that:• participants must always be made aware when, and how, they are being observed;• participants must be able to freely give consent to enlist in research, and can withdraw

at any time, without penalty;• researchers are required to maximize the benefits to participants, and minimize the risk,

associated with participation in the study;• any study involving human participants needs to be approved by an Institutional

Review Board (IRB)

Belmont Report (1979)http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html#gob

Outlines procedures for the ethical treatment of human subjects – in the wake of scandals that arose from studies where people were either not informed they were participating in a study and/or did not have the power to opt out.

• Tuskegee Syphilis Study• Tearoom Trade

Informed ConsentRequired headings for Informed Consent documents at NCSU

• What are some general things you should know about research studies?• What is the purpose of this study? • What will happen if you take part in the study? • Risks • Benefits • Confidentiality • Compensation • What if you have questions about this study?• What if you have questions about your rights as a research participant?• Consent To Participate

Other hallmarks of ethical social science (particularly ethnographic) research:- Participants have an opportunity to offer

different point of view- Participants can see any publications

beforehand and request changes/edits

New “unobtrusive” methods of data collection in MMOGs

Unobtrusive also means “uninformed” and “nonconsensual”

• Database scrapes • (Harrison and Roberts, 2011; Yee, 2012)• Data dumps • (Keegan et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2011; Williams

et al, 2011)• Automated bots • (Ducheneaut et al, 2004)

Where our data goes & how it gets there…

1. You buy the game, install it on your machine, and then either:

a) click “I agree” to the End User License Agreement, or;

b) turn the game off in disgust and return it to the store, telling them

that having read the EULA, there’s no way you’d ever consent to the conditions it lays out.

Circa 2004…

2. Play the game for years, meeting new people and leveling up a bunch of avatars. Over the course of your EQ2 career, you experiment with role-playing, you try buying in-game gold, and you play around with both same-sex and different-sex avatars.

3. It’s 2007. Finally bored with EQ2 and its awful graphics and repetitive play, you stop playing.

In 2009, two years after you stop playing, this news article comes out:

[Researcher]: "What do you collect?" [Sony]: "Well, everything—what do you want?" [Researcher]: "Can we have it all?" [Sony]: "Sure.”

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/02/aaas-60tb-of-behavioral-data-the-everquest-2-server-logs/

Gold farmers and buyers function similar to “RL” criminal networks

Keegan, B., Ahmed, M.A., Williams, D., Srivastava, J., and Contractor, N. (2010). “Dark gold: Statistical properties of clandestine networks in massively multiplayer online games.” SocialCom 2010, Minneapolis MN USA. Aug. 20-22, pp. 201-208.

“Dedicated role players were more lonely, less happy, more likely to be disabled, and more likely to have been diagnosed with depression, substance addictions, behavioral addictions, attention-deficit disorder, and learning disabilities”

Williams, D., Kennedy, T., and Moore, R. (2011). Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices, and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs. Games and Culture 6(2), pp. 171-200.

Who does this research benefit? What are the benefits to you?

Were you aware at the time that you were supplying information that could be used for this kind of study?

Did you have the chance to say no to participating?

The EULA replaces informed consent!

By clicking “I agree”, what else do we consent to?

Legality trumps ethics: informed consent is riskier than EULAs precisely because with informed consent, participants have more power: they can say no, and they can take legal action

Specific reading questions – in pairs

Periscopic play (Taylor):What does “periscopic” refer to?What does “homework” mean? What would it look like in the context of MMOGs? Any examples of “homework” in readings from the last 3 weeks?

Avatar experimentation (Fairfield):Who “owns” your behavior in MMOGs?Who is the article most concerned with protecting? Whose actions is it protecting from?

Informed consent (Reid):What went wrong in her study?How did she hurt the community she studied?In what other ways can MMOG research hurt people?