Today, researchers use such simulations to study how people act in events like job interviews, natural disasters, emergencies, and now even the end of the world. This method is especially useful for studying extreme situations too dangerous to create in the real world. The comparison is rarely ever one to one but researchers can still use the principle to get an idea about how people might react in a given situation.
In 2010, Dimitri Williams used Castronova as inspiration for what he termed “the mapping principle,” by which player behavior in games can map human behavior in real life. In 2006, Edward Castronova published a paper “On the Research Value of Large Games…” in which he claimed that MMORPGs “occasionally produce natural experiments in social science: situations that, through no intent of the designer, offer controlled variations on a phenomenon of theoretical interest.” With their wealth of data and the commitment from players, these games offer unique insight into real world dynamics in spaces from politics to economics. It isn’t a novel idea to use synthetic worlds as proxies for real world events. The researchers also had access to the entire chat log.Īfter crunching the data, Blackburn and his team were surprised by what they found. The records were divided into 75 different actions for things like combat, trading, and communications. At the researchers’ disposal were well over 275 million anonymized records from nearly 31,000 accounts during an eleven week period beginning at the end of 2011. “We thought it was a cool opportunity to look at this kind of philosophical or sociological idea in as close to an empirical way as we could come up with.” “They kind of just gave us the dataset and said, ‘Hey you want to take a look at this stuff?’” Jeremy Blackburn, a computer scientist at Telefonica Research and one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends.
ARCHEAGE MAP TRIAL
The idea to study ArcheAge, a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), as a proxy for an extreme scenario first emerged when the game’s developers offered the team of researchers a bunch of data from a closed beta test, in which a select group of players were invited to trial the game prior to launch.Īt the researchers’ disposal were well over 275 million anonymized records from some 81,000 characters. Instead, they seemed to give up on themselves. What they found was that, although some players carelessly killed and pillaged, most of them barely changed their behaviors toward each other in the end. Novels like The Road, video games like Fallout, and films like Children of Men paint the picture of a dog-eat-dog apocalypse in which murder is everywhere and everyone is miserable.īut what if it won’t be so bad? Maybe the end of days mean less killing and more Kumbaya?Ī new study by a team of international researchers has shined a brighter light on armageddon by analyzing player behavior in the last days of the online game ArcheAge. If we take fiction as a forewarning of fact, then the end times look pretty grim.
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