“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.
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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