Once upon a time, there was a professor of media studies named David Myers. This professor of media studies played a MMORPG called City of Heroes, and he noticed something interesting: Although the game was supposed to be PVP heroes vs. villains, the players weren't just fighting one another. They were chatting across enemy lines, setting up demonstration bouts, and even teaming up across enemy lines to take on the NPCs. Most of them didn't care about the game's stated goal of conquering all six bases. In fact, they had set up informal rules of battle that forbade the use of several game-legal maneuvers.

"Huh!" said the professor. "This is fascinating! Why don't I do a study to find out why player society has developed cross-grained to the mechanical rules of the game world?" So he interviewed participants to find out why they did what they did, and observed the social world of the game closely, and studied other games where the player culture opposed the programmed rules, and examined the body of online documentation about how player communities react to deviants, and--

OH WAIT NO HE DIDN'T I'M ON CRACK. Sorry. What he actually did was turn his longstanding character into a griefer, and aggravated the server he was on so thoroughly that they ostracized him and tried to have him banned. Then he moved to two more servers and did the same thing. Then he wrote a report in which he was very, very surprised and deeply hurt that people didn't like him when he was just playing by the rules.


( More links, and a social science student's perspective on David Myers's study )