Typically doomsday scenarios involve riot, looting, and chaos. However, such representations are taken from pop culture, and they are not based on any real data. In order to imagine how an apocalyptic situation could actually develop, scientists analyzed about 270 million records of "player behavior" from the popular South Korean multiplayer game ArcheAge, and then published a report, which drew attention to the magazine "New Scientist".
Players knew that their data and statistics would be destroyed when beta testing ended, and scientists wanted to see how game behavior would change as the world approached. “With the exception of a few special cases where people became more murderous, the authors found that most players did not engage in murder or antisocial behavior,” notes New Scientist.
"People don't really go crazy, they just stop worrying about the future," said study participant Jeremy Blackburn. For the most part, players spent little time on leveling up or completing quests, but rather just chatting with their game friends instead.
If you think about it, this is a lot like preparing for the final game of Mass Effect 3: the amount of time spent in calm atmosphere and communication with the team is much longer than spent on bloody scenes.
Researchers fully admit that no game can be a plausible counterpart to a real apocalypse. They say that "there have been no changes of a pandemic nature in behavior," however, the limitations associated with the fact that this is just a video game (while it already had several beta versions before), and with the absence of really dying people, significantly reduce the significance of the results of this experiment.
However, the test performed is not completely devoid of merit. “It would be naive on our part to pretend to be in complete agreement with the real behavior of people,” the report says. “However, players put a lot of time and energy into their characters, and virtual property is often costly these days, so there are real consequences in this case.”
Further research using the ArchAge video game will focus on criminal justice, using the in-game prison system as well as player-controlled courts. Some time ago, something similar happened in one of the games. Of course, this is not exactly the same thing, but the players actually perceived incarceration in the same way as it would happen to people in the real world.
Igor Abramov
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