It’s human nature to try to get an advantage, but we also see clear differences between behavior in online worlds and in face to face interaction. It’s the basic internet fuckwad theory. The layer of anonymity and lack of consequences makes it easier to beat up on people. There’s a huge percentage difference in the number of people who’d take advantage of someone who’s in a vulnerable position in a city street compared to in an MMO.

We can take relatively simple steps to encourage behavior. I’m reminded of a small experiment in a book I read dealing. The researchers sent psychology students to a lecture hall on the other side of the campus. They told half the students that the meeting was urgent, and they didn’t say anything to the other half. Along the path, they had an old actor who was hunching over and acting like he was seriously ill or dying. I can’t recall the numbers, but there was a significant correlation between the likelihood that someone who stop and whether they’ve been told the meeting was urgent. It was also amusing because they were going to attend a session on good Samaritans.

On Pirates, most of what I saw involved spending time trying to prevent specific behavior, which just leads to players finding more creative ways around those prevention mechanisms. I’d rather provide an incentive for the behavior we want to encourage. Inclusive is easier than exclusive, and people take delight in finding ways to do things that are supposed to be impossible.

I’m coming around to the idea that griefing and exploiting is just a failure on our part, not a flaw in the players. Thinking of those players as the natural state of play, and not as a few bad eggs, might be more helpful than just seeing them as the problem. They aren’t the problem. They’re the reality. Everyone looks for an edge. It’s human nature. Expecting different behavior in an online game is just silly. If anything, it’s the non-griefers, non-exploiters who are the problem. They are adopting a set of behaviors that runs counter to human nature and then becoming outraged when not everyone plays along.

That’s an extreme viewpoint, to be sure, but I’m trying to course correct and exploring the other extreme is a useful approach to doing so.

Basically, I think MMO designers spend too much time trying to construct a civil society. I think a more interesting approach might be to ask: what if we designed a game that was all about griefing, exploiting, and backstabbing, and then looked for corner cases where players could turn the tables and self-enforce a higher standard of civility. We could make the civil society people into the corner case that defines play, the way the griefers define play now.

I dunno where that leads, but I decided to stop thinking of griefers as the enemy and recognize that they are only making the most of an artificial situation we created and put them in. They’re our children.