Typically, most doomsday scenarios involve chaos, looting and unrest. However, such ideas are gleaned from pop culture, so they have no real data under them. To imagine the possible development of the apocalyptic situation, scientists analyzed about 270 million records of the behavior of players who play the popular multiplayer South Korean game ArcheAge.
Players were aware that after the end of the beta test, all of their credentials and statistics will be deleted. The scientists wanted to see if the behavior of the players will change during the time period when the end of the world approaches. As the researchers note, with the exception of a small number of cases where players became more suicidal, in most cases players did not resort to antisocial behavior or murder.
In fact, people just stop worrying about the future, notes experiment participant Jeremy Blackburn. For the most part, players did not waste time completing quests or raising the level, but simply chatting with friends in the game.
Something similar is observed at the final stage of the game Mass Effect 3: players spent much more time in a calm atmosphere, communicating with the team, rather than spending it on bloody scenes.
Researchers unanimously admit that no game can be analogous to the real apocalypse. According to scientists, no changes of a pandemic nature in the behavior of players were recorded, but the fact that this is just an online game and there are no really dying people significantly reduces the significance of the results obtained as a result of the experiment.
On the other hand, the results obtained are not completely useless. Scientists realize that it would be very naive to expect complete coincidence with the real behavior of people. But players spend a lot of time and effort on creating and developing their characters, moreover, often virtual property costs a lot of money, so we can say that in this case there may be real consequences.
The researchers envision further experimentation with the ArchAge game focusing on criminal justice, using the game's prison system and player-controlled courts. Something similar happened earlier in one of the games. Of course, these are not the same, but in reality, the players perceived the incarceration as if it happened to them in real life.