The most hated competitor at Loyola University in the last 30 years isn’t an athlete. He’s a computer geek who became so good at what he did that a complete stranger threatened to murder him.

In 2006, to conduct a study on how social norms in an online computer game world affected the ways its players played the game, mass communication professor David Myers created a super hero in the multiplayer role-playing game “City of Heroes.” He joined a community of 150,000 players from all over the world. His scrappy, high-leaping superhero “Twixt” rose to the game’s elite ranks. At that point, the purpose was to no longer spar with computer-controlled comic book enemies, but to battle with and defeat super villains controlled at keyboard- and mouse-point by other humans.

Heroes and villains seemed more focused on chatting and allowing each other to power up against computer-controlled enemies in peace. So Myers, an accomplished media scholar and game aficionado, wanted to see what would happen if he upset normal traditions.

His private message box blew up. “I hope your mother gets cancer.” “EVERYONE HATES YOU.” “U are a MAJOR s—bird.”

All the while, “they accused me of being ignorant and immature,” Myers said. All he did was become an efficient competitor, scoring kills with a brutal, simple, two mouse-click strategy. His character developed the power to teleport enemies wherever he wanted them to go. Myers double-clicked on them and sent them directly into the line of fire of a cartoon robot execution squad that instantly vaporized them with lasers.

Villains asked him to stop and make friends instead. But “Twixt” wanted to be a hero, a champion, so he kept killing them at an efficiency rate almost no player in the game could match. Villains tried to gang up on him, kill him and drive him away, but Twixt was too powerful, too elusive, even for five-member gangs.

Villains’ reputation started suffering. The verbal abuse wasn’t working. Campaigns to slander “Twixt” as a racist and a child molester failed. So was an Internet-wide campaign to discover his true identity for true retribution. Someone had to do something. Villain “Sypher” finally did. On May 1, 2007, he clicked on Twixt’s name and sent him a private message: “if you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.”

“That wasn’t fun,” Myers said. “I became a little scared at that point.”He revealed his identity and purpose on the game’s message boards just before he published his critically applauded paper in 2008. Now knowing that he was a college professor with an office in the Music/Communication Complex, his haters launched their most “fearsome” attack.

They relentlessly hunted down his picture. And made fun of his teeth.