Post by Morreion on Jun 10, 2014 15:44:44 GMT -5
Why Online Games Make Players Act Like Psychopaths (Wired)
DayZ and a similar open world, online survival game called Rust are among the best-selling games on Steam this year. Each drops players, unarmed and alone, into a dangerous world and challenges them to make their way in a harsh and occasionally cruel environment.
What’s emerged from this are online worlds in which the greatest threat isn’t the enemies created by the game designers, but the violent and unpredictable people playing the game alongside you. I experienced this first hand playing Rust with a friend, who revealed a part of himself I’d never known existed...
“Psychopaths will do things without any compunction, any internal guilt,” Perkins says. “It’s a cognitive style that places little or no value on fair treatment of others.”
This isn’t to say psychopaths are by definition more violent than the rest of us. Violence wouldn’t bother a psychopath, Perkins says, but they might have another incentive to avoid violence: the consequences of getting caught. Most psychopaths are logical people, he says, and understand that actions bring consequences. The threat of repercussions—say, for example, prison—might keep them from acting out.
Such disincentives do not exist in virtual worlds. Absent a sense of empathy, you’re free to rob and kill at will. What we do with this reveals something about us. Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, says imagining ourselves doing something horrible is a way to see ourselves in a new light.
Why do games prompt cruel behavior? (Massively)
Comment:
I think it's a combination of several factors. Three that I can of are 1) lack of oversight 2) lack of consequence 3) lack of 'reality'.
1) In games, there are few, if any, of the systems that we normally have in place to regulate behavior. There's no one to tell those that engage in disruptive, or even sociopathic, behavior to stop, and those with the power to do so often refuse to curb, or even outright encourage, it.
2) Tying into #1 above, those who engage in this behavior are able to do so knowing that there will either be no punishment at all, or, at best, very light punishment, and there certainly aren't going to be tangible punishments unless the people in question allow this behavior to leak into the 'real' world.
3) Tying into #2, there is a wide, societal-scale idea that games and the analog (IRL) world are separate environments with little to no impact on the other. A player feels no impact from what they're doing because it's "just" a game. Behavior that would, at best, indicate a possible need for psychiatric help, if not outright imprisonment, in the analog world is tolerated or even dismissed because of where it takes place.
I think a lot of the EVE- and DayZ-style sociopathy that we see would be curbed if more games looked into addressing at least points 1 and 2.
1) In games, there are few, if any, of the systems that we normally have in place to regulate behavior. There's no one to tell those that engage in disruptive, or even sociopathic, behavior to stop, and those with the power to do so often refuse to curb, or even outright encourage, it.
2) Tying into #1 above, those who engage in this behavior are able to do so knowing that there will either be no punishment at all, or, at best, very light punishment, and there certainly aren't going to be tangible punishments unless the people in question allow this behavior to leak into the 'real' world.
3) Tying into #2, there is a wide, societal-scale idea that games and the analog (IRL) world are separate environments with little to no impact on the other. A player feels no impact from what they're doing because it's "just" a game. Behavior that would, at best, indicate a possible need for psychiatric help, if not outright imprisonment, in the analog world is tolerated or even dismissed because of where it takes place.
I think a lot of the EVE- and DayZ-style sociopathy that we see would be curbed if more games looked into addressing at least points 1 and 2.
Comment:
They don't prompt cruel behaviour - rather, they attract a particular kind of person. I, for instance, will never play an MMO where I'm likely to be ganked, because I like to play the way I want and ganking is a form of dictatorship (forcing me to waste time on re-spawns, obtaining another set of gear, etc). Likewise, I'll never gank others, because I have respect for the real people controlling the avatars on the other side of the screen. Some other people though, use the lame excuse that "it's just a game and harms nobody" to act like the stereotypical neighbourhood bully wherever the ruleset allows. As those rulesets are in a minority, they act like magnets for this type of gamer.
Comment:
Maybe we are already that way? Maybe humankind is wicked inside, not fundamentally good as humanists said, and games just provide a canvas to the evil inside us?
