Roy Tannhauser wrote:Black Pedro wrote:Roy Tannhauser wrote:Very insightful. Seeing as to how CCP loves to entertain the thought of EVE as a sandbox environment to the real world, I would love to see a psychology study to determine the level of psychopathic behavior EVE player actually harbors, and if playing EVE as an in game criminal actually encourages and cultivates such tendencies in the real world.
Me too. They can put them on the shelf beside those unfortunate Master's theses such as 'Meglomania and attempts at world domination induced by the board game Risk: a collection of case studies" or "Mario Kart players and dangerous driving: the hidden menace on our roads".
In all seriousness,
a bunch of studies that came out of the
anti-Dungeons and Dragons hysteria of the eighties on this very issue found no adverse psychological effects on those that play role-playing game. I am sure any equivalent study of Eve players would find the same: how one behaves in an imaginary and consequence-free setting like a competitive video game has no bearing on real-world behaviour.
But these games simply do not compare to EVE.
Don't they? If I am at a party and some dude I just met has his race car-driving gorilla ram me off the road, or some girl decides to break our alliance and invade Kamchatka after leading me to believe she was my ally, I don't call them psychopaths or mentally ill (or assume this is how they act in their real life). They are both playing the game as it was designed to be played.
Yes, Eve is more of a sandbox game with less defined goals, and also probably considered by some as a role-playing game given the intricate backstory and way your customize and control your character (although in my experience, most players play Eve as a strategic or tactical ship combat simulator or economic simulator, rather than an RPG, especially given the prevalence of alts) but like those other games, it is a virtual, imaginary universe where no consequences spill over into the real world. It is a game. If you cannot separate your reality from the wonderful, but fictitious, virtual reality that CCP has created, then you probably need to step back from Eve for a bit.
Many studies have been done on people who play pen-and-paper RPGs in the last decades (and people who play video games) and never consistently found any correlation with mental illness or negative anti-social behaviours. Humans are more than capable of assuming a dark role in a game, or as an actor or story teller, and not become evil in real life. It is my experience that most ruthless space pirates and space thieves are perfectly well-adjusted and pleasant people in real life.
Eve is about conflict and competition in a dystopian future universe. While some of the characters in New Eden are monsters, you shouldn't think the person behind that character is one for defeating you in a pretend game or for just playing in that competitive universe by the agreed rules.