Theonerayman

So after a couple weeks of playing this experiment and spending the last week before graduation talking with my fellow Psychology Majors (all juniors with, 4 of us are also Philosophy Majors) about the psychology behind this experiment as Rocket is calling it. Now we, for the sake of making it actually into survival mode, going to assume that each person who makes it as a survivor (or Bandit) has the mental capacity to not only accept the fact that every person they have ever known is dead, but there is a good chance that some of them are walking around eating people. We were not going to focus on that aspect. What we did focus on was the impact that taking a human life has on a person. There is a reason that when one of our men/women in blue, in every police department in the US is involved with a shooting in which they draw their weapon and kill a person they are sent to MANDATORY therapy. The act of killing another human being, be it in defense of yourself, or defense of another, takes a seriously psychological toll on the human psyche. Now before anyone goes and says "what about people who suffer from sociopathy" that is roughly, from the most generously large numbers we could find, 4% of the entire human population. That means for at least 96% of every single other human being on the planet the taking of another life has some effect on their mental state. Even trained soldiers from military's around the world who are put in combat situations and fire fights are forced to undergo rigorous psychological testing to determine if they are still able to function as the military needs them to. Why is this? Why is the number of soldiers suffering from P.T.S.D. on the rise? Because the taking of another life is mentally scaring, and it takes, for some individuals decades of therapy to over come. There are still vets from the Vietnam conflict, who at the sound of a fire cracker, drop down to the ground for fear they are being shot at by the Viet Cong, 40 years later. So what does this little psychology lesson have to do with Dayz? Simple. There needs to be SOME mechanic for taking the life of another. Rocket, think about this for a moment (and yes I have read your multiple interviews where you give no reasoning what so ever for your stance on the loss of life that takes place) you have gone through pain staking development on make sure this experiment is as realistic as possible. There is weather that can lower your body temp, which in turns gets you sick. Falling from 2 meters can easily cause you to break your leg and send you into shock. Getting shot or hit causes you to slowly bleed out and medical attention must be given. You have to eat and drink to keep to yourself alive. BUT at the end of the day, anyone can run around and just shoot anyone else with zero repercussion. Lets take a look at the stats for a second, as of this posting there are 105286 survivors alive and 14362 bandits. That's 7.33 bandits for every survivor. 119,684 people alive total 12% of them are bandits, that means that 12% of the population have taken enough lives to be considered a bandit. Now those people, in game have no repercussions, nothing to make them feel bad for killing so many people so by the very definition of sociopathy, they are indeed sociopaths. Do you see an issue there Rocket? Without some form of control the percentage of sociopaths in this game is over 3x (and by some studies 6x) the percent of sociopaths that likely exist in the world today. Now we all understand that you don't want to hamper anyone's play style, for choice is king and everyone should be able to choose how they go about survival. But in life, as should be in any true experiment, every action has consequences. The people should HAVE the choice to be a bandit or not, to run around and shoot every person that they see, but there needs to be consequences. Because in the real world, which to this point you have gone through painstaking detail to recreate, a large portion of the bandits (at least 75%) wouldn't be able to sleep at night for the things they did, they would have visions of every single face they killed, and eventually there is a extremely high probability of suffering a mental break down. At which point one of a few things could happen, they could just walk around looking like one of the zombies on the map, they would just ball up in cry until they starved or something ate them. Or they would put the barrel of their gun into their own mouths and pull the trigger to try and escape the images that haunt them. You say that limiting pvp would take away the spirit of the experiment. But we have all unanimously agreed over 12 long hours of discussion, if your aim of this experiment really is to be as real as possible you are grossly overlooking a very important part of the survival aspect. Because while shooting someone else and taking their things is a viable survival strategy (in theory) people might rethink shooting the guy in the back and taking his things after a week of not being able to close their eyes because they see the face of the man they killed after they rolled him over and picked him clean. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read all of this.

So now were going ALL the way back and talking about using some system, ok. Well let me ask you this. Is it fair that we all loose our food at the same rate? Because its not up for debate that some people can just flat out go longer without food than others. What about standing out in the rain. Some people have much better immune systems than others! Some of us maybe get sick once a year, while others are sick multiple times a month! The game puts us all on the same playing field and no one thinks twice about it. This would be NO different except now its curtailing someones antisocial behavior. Using your logic of everyone being different why should I have to find food just as often as you, or someone else? Maybe I can go longer without food! Maybe my immune system is way better than yours but worse than Joe's. Is it fair that we all have to be on the same level when it comes to the chances of getting sick? We are already making sweeping generalizations about the players.

I did take basic probs and stats. Not a math major, Philosophy and Psychology with a history minor. But to say that case studies cant help determine things couldn't be more wrong. The DSM IV has huge amounts of its information based ALL on MULTIPLE case studies! Also I'm not using case studies to generalize peoples behaviors, I was using examples to support my argument. If you cant understand the difference you need to go take a practical reasoning course.

Whos Plato? But I jest. You say that I am failing to rebut your argument, and that I am basing all of my rebuttal on 1 case in all of human history. So lets try and add a few more instances ok. Bernie Madoff who ripped off 30 billion (yes that is a B) off of thousands because he knew how to manipulate them. The Baptist Foundation of Arizona who used the guise of Religion to fleece Millions from all sorts of people, how about Lou Perlman (yeah the guy who founded the Backstreet Boys and Nsync) Was a fantastic conman who knew exactly how to exploit people. Not only in buy millions worth of horrid boy band albums but actually conned 500 million away from people with a ponzi scheme involving his Trans Continental Savings Program. Again ALL of these cases have something common, the backgrounds of the people were from every walk of life and from in most cases all over the world. Again. We humans, aren't that different. PS No Freudian psychoanalysts for me, don't wanna spend the time in London being psychoanalyzed myself for 2 years before I can actually work.

The way you are dismissive of my argument without fully understanding or rebutting it, and the way you throw random events into the conversation as though they stand in place of a proper rebuttal, tells me that you really should study quite a bit more of the subject of psychology before passing an absolutist judgments on its implications and effects. It doesn't matter if human beings are fundamentally similar; of course they are, we're the same species! The point is that each person reacts differently, even if slightly differently, to every stimuli and scenario. Everybody has a sex drive, right? So I guess that means we all act and react to all sexual stimuli in the same manner, right? Of course not. Everybody is minutely different in each aspect of their sexuality from everyone else around them, no matter how superficially similar they may appear. For another example, even if 99% of people experienced PTSD following traumatic events, there would still be 1% who did not; how would you implement a game mechanic reflecting that on a level that does not ruin the immersion and realism of the game for each individual player? Simply put, you can't. You seem to be trying to argue from some fallacious position of authority here, instead of presenting concise and rebutting comments to those who disagree, including myself, especially so far as those arguments relate to DayZ and potential changes to it. If you want changes made to DayZ, and on the basis of psychological science, it is your obligation to prove how those would, or even could, be effective down to the individual level without compromising the realistic and immersive nature of the game. Putting the philosopher hat back on for a moment, when the premise of your argument is that everyone is monumentally different (your words not mine) the rest of your argument crumbles under the shotty foundation. Now going back to the Psychologist, I am not saying we are JUST fundamentally the same. I am saying that man kind is far more alike than someone can understand without a great deal of study, and I am far from finished learning all that we even know which isn't even everything. And the Jonestown example is perfect here considering those 900 people couldn't have come from a more diverse group of backgrounds and places if they tried. Those people were from everywhere. Jones had 20+ grey hound buses he took all over the country. But at the end of the day he exploited them all because he knew how to control people on a base level, because we for the most part are a lot alike (and remember there are exceptions to every rule)

I am guessing you don't know that the cool aid was laced with cyanide and all 900 of those people died. The drank it KNOWING that it was poison. They were people from America who moved there to start a socialist paradise. They carved a town 20 miles out into the jungle. When I saw you talking about them getting hyper because of the sugar, I literally almost wanted to cry.

The problem is that those other mechanics are direct reflections of the real world: You don't eat, you get hungry. You don't drink, you get thirsty. You are exposed to the elements, you risk getting sick. It's all logical, and realistic, even if slightly exaggerated in the game (and perhaps that exaggeration should be changed). But one of the enormous reasons DayZ is so fantastic, and interesting from a psychological standpoint, is that it's all happening to you, the character, as a direct, natural result of your choices. It makes it immersive, and makes you, the player, feel a part of the game world. But when you kill somebody in the game, you feel...what exactly? Should you feel good? Should you feel bad? Something in-between? The answer is any and all of them, perhaps some all at once. This is really the essence of human behavior and psychology, everybody is monumentally different, has different motives for what they do, and will feel different emotions and reactions to those choices. A game mechanic intended to simulate real world effects would be taking that choice, and natural consequence, away from the player, and making the judgment call for them following the logic that, since most people feel this about that, you, the player, will also feel this about that. Not only is a game mechanic entirely ill-equipped to represent, or accurately gauge, the spectrum of human emotion and behavior, but it would detract from the realism, and therefore the immersion, and thus detract from the entirety of DayZ itself. The part where you say that humans are monumentally different is where you go off course and your line of thought I am sorry to say falters. Humans, aren't that different. Its the reason that companies run ads on TV for products the way they do (there are entire courses in Psychological Marketing), its the reason that people from ALL walks of life get caught up in Ponzi schemes, or get taken by confidence men. Mankind as a whole are actually dangerously similar. Want another example? Guyana South America 18 November 1978, over 900 people drank the literal cool aid (actually flavor aid but I digress) because a man named Jim Jones knew just how similar people were (these were rich people, poor people, doctors, lawyers, and laborers). And before you go thinking that the People's Temple was just some cult do your reading. Especially about the good that they did in the mid 70s in San Francisco. Rev. Jim Jones knew how to exploit people, were not that different.

Nobody says killing other people should have no downsides What I'm saying is that killing other people should have no ARTIFICIAL downside No gameplay mechanic judging your actions or telling you to not do bad stuff That is the sandbox enviroment that Rocket is trying to achieve A sanity meter based on a random number is just an artificial wall telling you to not shoot that guy over there' date=' because the numbers told you so You talk about it like it'd be a risk-reward mechanic, eat now and go insane or starve to death But in the end it's just a message telling you "HALT RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM" [/quote'] Well then, if NO body is saying there shouldn't be downsides then it should be easy for Rocket to come up with something that handles the situation. But I'm hearing "No one says there shouldn't be downsides. But those shouldn't come from the game itself. They should come from something else. Again no one is saying there shouldn't be something, just not something that hampers our want to have our cake and eat it to"

There are people in this world when given the chance were unable to kill someone who was threatening to kill their entire family..and as a consequence the entire family was killed because the father, even with a gun was unable to pull the trigger (it was a case we studied in which a convicted murder told the story in which he said that he had wished the man had shot him, because now he was serving life in prison and saw the faces of the children he murdered every time he closed his eyes). So the father doesn't kill the murderer and his entire family died because of it. You still think just because there are zombies in the world that everyone is suddenly immoral, forgot everything they had ever been taught and will just kill anyone and everyone to survive when this man couldn't shoot a stranger to not only protect himself but his family?

And you know why? Because the person I shot lacked situational awareness If he would've had scanned his surroundings he might've noticed me and reacted He fails to do so, he dies There should be no punishment for me when others fail to play the game, just because a random number has decided I would mentally break down from a single human kill Again, see my Amnesia reference, you need a confined enviroment for something like this to work, and it barely does in Amnesia already Having a sanitiy meter in ArmA2 would be, as other described it, a "cheesy" mechanic at best Wow..talking about missing the point. The point was that you had a choice and with those choices there are consequences. Do you continue to scavenge for food/water and maybe run out of time, or do you take the shot knowing that the strain on your sanity could kill you. We call it the "Have your cake and eat it to" theory. In which a person wants everything but none of the responsibility that goes along with it. Without totally resulting to a straw man argument lets akin it to this. The people who want to just run around and shoot everyone and have no downside are like a child who wants a puppy. They wanna hug it, and love it, put it on a leash and take it for a walk, show off to their friends this cute adorable little dog. But when it comes time to clean up said puppy's poop they don't wanna have to clean up after it. They don't wanna have to feed it. They just wanna love it, and show it off and let someone else take care of unpleasant stuff. (As much as I would like to take credit for that analogy I cannot, my friend Richard ((No Deg not you if your reading this eventually)) came up with it in our discussions)

Bravo sir (or madam), one of my colleagues actually brought up the SS death squads in which you refer but in this writing I was afraid that very few would know what I would be talking about. So thank you for bringing it up, you just proved that I was mistaken in that assumption.