I have always enjoyed playing computer games, particularly those that force you to think tactically or have a curious twist. Lately I have been thinking about a couple of games that provoked some interesting thoughts.
Let’s start with the past and my favourite game of all time which is Rome Total War. For those not familiar with the Total War style of games, these are strategy games played on the PC where you build and maintain empires and armies and get the opportunity to fight battles with those armies in real time. They are many games of this ilk such as Civilisation, but they way the Total War dynamics is crafted by the game developer has always been interesting to me. In Rome , they really introduced the concept of not only capturing towns by diplomatic or military means, but also in having to hold on to it. This could be done by garrisoning it, building cultural buildings such as temples or circuses to keep the population happy or rather more chillingly by simply massacring everyone. For experienced players, they soon learnt that logistically it was far easier to massacre everyone as it freed up troops to use to capture the next town. While Roman times was pretty brutal, this is perhaps a rather excessive game dynamic and so the Total War team made this much less of a ‘sensible’ option for their later titles.
This brings up the interesting social question, how many gamers took the lazy way out and used the massacre option more than they ‘morally’ should? What does this tell us about people or more pertinently political leaders today? While massacring settlements is hardly a popular or common way to do things these days (occasional and vicious hot spots in the world not included) if you were a party leader and it was easier to destroy your opponents with lies than by winning the intellectual argument, would you not take it? All is fair in love and war and it can be argued that democracy is simply war conducted by more civilised means. In war, there is no such thing as cheating to win (although treatment of civilians and prisoners is meant to be above this and held to a higher standard) and thus it cannot be denied that any political group would be tempted to take shortcuts to their political objective. In the Rome Total War game, you were slightly punished for being so bloodthirsty by having lower popularity ratings, but then if you ruled a huge empire with a large army available this was hardly a deterrence. So what deters democratic leaders of today? How can a proper democratic system punish cheaters? Sadly, the answer would seem to be “not very well”.
Let’s look at a more modern and strangely fascinating game that I have got into called DayZ. This game is very simple, you find yourself on the coast of a small country infested with zombies and other human players will be around too. There is no government, there are no rules and you have to find weapons, food and medical supplies and simply survive. This is a socially fascinating game because you soon learn that forget the zombies, an awful lot of people are willing to murder you for the contents of your backpack! Some people are willing to club together, pool resources and help you fight off the zombies, but you never know which type of person you will encounter and they may even stab you in the back later on. So what would happen in the real world if there was a similar break down in social order? Would most people get together or would a huge number be willing to do anything to survive including overriding social taboos such as murder? Be aware that this game is a little unusual, once you die, you have to start all over again losing any progress you have made. While not comparable to taking a life, there is a definite sense of loss.
It is an interesting and chilling concept that this is how people may choose to act and it is hard to deny that in the right circumstances DayZ could represent a realistic social dynamic. The important factor here is that the gamers do start from a position of not having a social group or community that they belong to. Sex, race, nationality or creed are irrelevant here. It is quite telling that those game servers where people co-operate with each other the most are the ones where gaming clans (let’s call them a voluntary community) have consciously set themselves up and only members are invited. If you are not a part of that community, the odds are high that you will get shot if the zombies don’t get to you first. Does this perhaps sound rather familiar?
Of course these are computer games free from moral and social constraints and so we should not read too much into them. But in these games normal people can make vivid choices and sometimes those choices can translate to real life. When playing in online games, I have learnt to avoid Russian servers for those games where teamwork is required. I cannot explain why, but for some reason the Russian servers are absolutely terrible for teamwork. Is it cultural, social? I cannot say, only that it is a pattern repeated again and again. Take away all constraints, give people the choice of being nice or nasty and too often nasty wins.
Does this mean people are not naturally willing to be nice to each other and so extensive social conditioning is what is needed to keep humanity flowing? Or does everyone just like to let off steam once in a while?
