Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
If you’ve played an extraction shooter like Arc Raiders or Marathon, you’ve probably experienced the agony of trusting another player only for them to shoot you in the head and nick all your stuff. Whenever that happens—and it’s happened to me more than I’d like to admit—the same questions run through my head (after the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth). Was that always going to happen? Did I do something wrong? Should I have said something different? Behaved differently? Or should I have simply foregone any attempt at diplomacy and shot first?
I’ve often wondered if there’s a way to get better at this. Not just to convince other players that I’m not a threat, but to make them not want to shoot me. Conveniently, I recently had the chance to speak to someone who knows a thing or two about resolving such situations, both in videogames and real life.
(Image credit: Embark)
James ‘Pigeon’ Fielder is one of only two political scientists in the world who specialise in gaming. Or at least, if there are more than two, Fielder is yet to be made aware of them: “When I talk about my research with fellow political scientists they either look at me like I’m crazy or they go ‘Oh, that sounds cool.'”
Political science is the study of governments, which in turns means it’s the study of human behaviour at a large-scale, organised level. Areas of interest include policy development, power distribution, and most importantly for us, conflict resolution.
What relevance does this have to games? Fielder answers this himself: “It’s almost like taking theories of political science and doing fruit fly experiments, like trying to understand human behaviour, specifically human political behaviour, inside of game worlds,” he says. “In a space like EVE Online, we might see political phenomena develop in weeks, months, or years that in real life would take decades or centuries to express themselves.”
(Image credit: CCP Games)
How does one become a political scientist specialising in games? Well, it’s not exactly a job with an established career path, but Fielder arrived at it through his career in the US military, where his lifelong love of TTRPGs resulted in an aptitude for designing wargames. “I was getting groomed to be promoted from specialist to sergeant, and to be promoted, I had to demonstrate that I could teach a class,” he says. “So I decided to build a class on a task that integrated roleplaying game elements. Why it seemed like a good idea at the time, I can’t recall. All I know is that everybody had a great time.”
Fielder’s commanding officers took notice: “Once you get that stink on you in the military, like ‘Oh Fielder, can you build another exercise for us?’ You build another exercise, and they would get bigger and bigger,” he says. “To date, the biggest exercise I’ve ever designed was for 5,000 people that ran 168 hours.”
Fielder eventually switched from the US Army to the US Air Force and was hired by the Air Force Academy to teach political science. “My degrees are in history and national security … but it was political science who hired me.” During a lesson on social capital or “why do people trust each other” as Fielder puts it, one student asked a question—can people develop trust in online games the same way they do in person?
(Image credit: Larian)
“Like a good scientist, I went ‘Huh, I don’t know. Let me look that up,” Fielder says. “That’s when I started learning why games are so effective at bringing people together.”
To very briefly summarise why games are effective in this manner: while the scenarios games present are fictional, the feelings they produce in the people playing them are very real. Anyone who has rage-quit a game will understand this. But games are also capable of producing more complex emotions and imagined states of being.
With roleplaying games in particular, they encourage people to inhabit personalities and mental states other than their own. In the right circumstances, these feelings can help instil empathy or new perspectives in people. “A [prison] inmate, for example, might put on the character of a lawful good hero,” Fielder posits. “Now, when I’m supposed to be stealing from people, or using violence or vandalism, I’m going to play a Paladin, and now I’m inculcating what it’s like to be a lawful good Paladin. I get debriefed at the end of the game, and I go ‘Oh, it actually felt good. It felt good to be playing that different person.'”
(Image credit: Chaosium)
Fielder has applied these techniques in a military context, such as forecasting the outcome of elections in Afghanistan as he discussed in a 2023 TeDX talk. But since retiring from the military, he’s also applied these techniques in a civilian context, running games and exercises for businesses, prisons, and other institutions.
What’s especially interesting, though, is that the lessons learned from playing out scenarios in the real world can then feed back into games and game design. To take the latter first, alongside his political science work, Fielder is also an RPG designer and design consultant: “When I run games at conventions and I run one shots, if it’s an invention that I’ve designed, I work to try to maximise the amount of agency players have,” he says.
“Players want to feel like they’re powerful and can do something cool, even if it’s an unforgiving setting like Call of Cthulhu …. Where the lethality is high, players like to think that the decisions they make matter, and when they do, when the dice work against them and they can see the dice fall, they’re more likely to accept it as fair.”
(Image credit: Krafton)
Likewise, players can deploy techniques for deescalation and establishing trust used in the real world in games too, which is where we circle back to extraction shooters. Fielder starts by pointing out that the rules of the game must support cooperation to begin with. “If it’s a game like the original iteration of PUBG, then that’s impossible because you know that ‘The only way to win is I have to kill everybody.'”
This might seem obvious. But it’s also applicable on a sliding scale—the more explicit and involved the rules are for cooperation, the more likely players will use them. This is why you’re more likely to see cooperation in Arc Raiders than Marathon. While Marathon has the capacity for cooperative play, this idea hasn’t filtered through to the playerbase in the way it did with Arc Raiders, perhaps because of its faster TTK, or its friendly callout being less clear than Arc Raiders’ ‘Don’t Shoot!’
But assuming that the rules apply and there’s at least a base level of comprehension. “The best way—it’s not foolproof—is to approach without visible weapons. If there’s a way to have an emoticon where you can have your hands outstretched … and this comes from my military background, [it] demonstrates ‘Look, my hands are empty, and it’s very difficult for me to grab a weapon, even in a videogame.'”
(Image credit: Embark)
In addition, Fielder says trust is established a lot faster if you have something to offer and offer it freely. “I don’t expect anything in return except let’s not fight,” he says. “The more valuable that item is, the more receptive your audience will be.” He concedes that there is a risk here. “If you offer something very valuable they [might] go, ‘Oh, maybe he has more stuff.'”
Fielder has spent much of his life studying and using games as a method to resolve conflict. But there is one area of conflict where a solution still eludes him, and that’s within the gaming community itself. “It actually hurts me when I see social differences in the gaming space, gatekeepers over racial differences, gender differences, or players [who] are angered with each other,” he says.
“In reality, one of the best places to overcome differences with people is a game. You learn, you sit down to play, you work together to overcome an objective,” Fielder continues. “Gaming should be the most inclusive space in the world. And why it’s not always that case, I don’t know.”
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