Except for all the people who don't.Originally Posted by ado
Except for all the people who don't.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
Well this is supposed to have been what happened in the experiment the story describes. It's be harder to do now, but if the story was true (again I don't think it is) you could have just asked on the MC forums or somewhere, "looking for 30 players for private server on custom map".
Yes, but you'd figure out it was smaller. Especially if it was this small. It wouldn't take long, with 30 players wandering around. Besides, in the example they were told not to go outside some particular bounds (bedrock walls, apparently ... which is a little odd since you'd think they just couldn't go outside and there'd be no reason to tell them ... but oh well).
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
Perhaps, but that's actual survival. Even then, we're yet to see it on a super massive scale.
It wouldn't be interesting at all. It'd just be a bunch of people playing Minecraft. Whether they know that it's a tiny restricted server or not, they always know that they're playing a game with no real consequences or wider implications. The world shuts down and nobody is really worse off. There's no interesting social experiment here - it's just a bunch of people playing a game and acting like dicks when the opportunity arises.
It's exactly the same as with DayZ. In a "real" zombie outbreak (if I can use that term, please allow it just this once) you're unlikely to find people deathmatching in the middle of town or deliberately trolling people by killing them for taking one step.
This story is just somebody's poorly written attempt at a Minecraft "Stanford prison-style" experiment. Except it's survival and not a prison obviously.
Don't give credence to the claim! Ado has yet to substantiate it. Personally, I can't think of very many survival scenarios in which breakdown of cooperation is the norm. Subsistence societies have existed in relatively harsh climates and even among sensationalized stories I can remember hearing about more horrific situations in which human cooperation triumphed (or in which everyone succumbed for reasons completely unrelated to human nastiness) than I can situations in which small groups of people in survival situations broke down into chaos and nastiness. Larger groups of people in non-survival situations ... well, that's another matter.Perhaps, but that's actual survival. Even then, we're yet to see it on a super massive scale.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
I think it would still be interested to play Minecraft in a severely limited world. Games can be plenty interesting without being experiments.
And to play devil's advocate: people in the Stanford Prison experiment also knew they weren't really being arrested and imprisoned. While a game certainly adds a level of abstraction to any kind of behavioral analysis, that layer of abstraction neither makes it fundamentally less interesting nor completely evades the results of analogous real-world situations and interactions.
That said ... I also think it was poorly written, not-especially-revealing, and a rather poor excuse for an "experiment" due to the rather poor documentation.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
I fully agree that you'd figure it out. Which is why I again, don't believe the story actually happened. He mentions that only two people copped on to what was going on from the start and the rest didn't before "it was too late". And I agree that if I was told you're playing minecraft in a very small box, that there would be limited resources.
I know ... it just seems so obvious. I can believe that people failed to cooperate, but not that they failed to figure it out. It's not like real life where we have a really big planet that's spread out and whatnot and it's reasonable that most people don't understand exactly where all their stuff comes from. It's another in a game where players know where their stuff comes from and know exactly how big the world is and approximately what's in it. It's the reflexive property: small limited map = small limited map. There's absolutely nothing to figure out.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
It's possible that most people, even if they were aware of the limited resources, wouldn't consider the other players adversaries until fairly late. I don't think my first thought would be that I'd have to fight for the resources, more that some kind of system would need to be worked out between the players.
It does seem a bit odd that the two people in the 'griefer faction' could not only keep their base from getting attacked, but at the same time also attack others. If the other factions were as large as it sounds like, taking over that sky base shouldn't have been so hard.
Whether real or not, it is an interesting experiment. Not sure how much fun it'd be to actually play it out, though.
What experiment? It's a bunch of people playing a game. There's no hypothesis or really anything here except "Let's make up a story about a bunch of people who play in a really small Minecraft world." Even assuming it did happen as stated (which I'm fairly certain it didn't) it's still just a bunch of people playing a game with modified rules. Nothing's learned except that people like to be dicks when playing games, and you don't need Minecraft to know that.
heh. okay.
Minecraft helps. Well, that idea is mildly entertaining. Most of the time it just involves large quantities of TNT. Which, when not mutually consented to, is rather awful.
Last edited by gwathdring; 24-08-2012 at 07:59 PM.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
Yeah, drag out 5 people with a few dozen blocks of something and tower your way up there whilst they're out griefing, and you'd be fine.
And for being so desperate for resources, there's surprisingly little organised mining (with parallel tunnels) visible.
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