"Media professor David Myers, from Loyola University, has been studying how people interact in online games...

Myers has been studying human interaction in City of Heroes since it first launched all the way back in 2004, ... with his character "Twixt"...
Sticking strictly within the game's rules, Myers nevertheless quickly set about making himself unpopular by...doing what the game advertising itself as allowing people to do: create a superhero and battle other superheroes.

See, many players in CoH simply liked hanging out, and teaming up with each other to take down AI opponents. But Myers sought out player vs player action, and began hunting down "villains". He'd fight them, he'd beat them. And because he was good at what he did, he soon built up an impressive list of enemies.

This is where things got nasty; while initially he was gently warned against rampant player-killing, warnings soon blossomed into threats, with Myers sent messages like "I hope your mother gets cancer." Charming. The abuse eventually became so intense - he was accused of being a paedophile and of being a racist - that people were directly threatening Myers and his family, leading him to report them to publishers NCSoft.

Myers went on to publish his account in his study "Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt""

(Kotaku)


The publication was published in 2008 (dating of the Kotaku article). July 06 (07), 2009 an article was published on nola.com about the professor’s publication. In response to the article, bloggers from the game community published angry responses. Later, other publishers also commented on the publication and the whole situation.