Now I’ve been on reddit long enough to question the validity of this guy’s story. I’ve also been on reddit long enough to know that crazier shit has happened. Either way it’s a nice story but regardless of the truth it raises an interesting question. Can we use video games like Minecraft to simulate real world occurrences, and predict the outcomes of potential events via such a method? This played on my mind for quite a long while, so I decided to do some digging. (excuse the pun)
The very first story I came across after looking into this was an article on a new initiative by the UN Habitat called “Block by Block.” Essentially the project recreates a real-life third world community within the game, and then asks the children of these often very rural and isolated villages to show what they would like to see changed. I think this is a fantastic project that offers real world solutions; and can provide people without a voice, or the power of the written word, to be able to wield that power to create a positive change. Now, can I first offer my services as the guy who accurately and faithfully recreates townships within the minecraft world, because I would TOTALLY do that, as a job, for money. Moving on.
I do think this is a great initiative, and blends the boundaries between the virtual world and the real world, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, I want to be able to explore the human psyche, and see how people behave when under the sort of hypothetical conditions we may or may not have to face. Searching further, I came across something known only as the “Corrupted Blood Incident.” It sounded fucking spooky, so I read on.
The Corrupted Blood Incident came about due to an update to World of Warcraft. This new update added a new dungeon with a new boss character, who could inflict characters with a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which would essentially drain their health and pass itself on to other nearby players. Corrupted Blood was intended to only be used in the boss fight, but teleporting out of the fight caused a glitch which allowed it to break out into the wider world. Once out, it spread like wildfire, leaving most populated town in the game simply a sea of dead players. The incident in the end could only be stopped by patching the problem and then Blizzard pressing the big red ‘reset’ button on their servers, but it’s gained notoriety due to it’s unintended accuracy in the recreation of an outbreak of infectious disease, the sort of shit you see in movies. Academics were keen to study what happened and how players behaved, noticing that many fled the cities, desperate to escape the disease, whilst others who were infected either tried to fight it, succumbed to their fate, or tried to deliberately infect others. Most players acted in the way people have been seen to react to disasters in the real world and it provided an insight into the behaviour of the general public in such a situation.
Nearly every aspect of players behaviour could be compared to real world occurrences, which is what makes this so notable, and why MMORPG’s are the likeliest candidate to run such experiments, since they involve real people who take the game seriously, and therefore behave in a realistic manner. However, Minecraft seems then to be the ideal candidate for such tests, since it has a far greater sandbox element than WoW, and like WoW, but unlike most other sandbox games, you can gather a relatively large number of real people in the game, to study real human behaviour, as you would in the real world. The freedom Minecraft offers allows people to act even more like they would in a real world scenario, and gives people the ability to better craft the world to fit the scenario of such experiments.
Of course the main benefit to simulating the real world is that you don’t have to go through the real danger of starving people or infecting them with a virus, and you don’t have to go through the same degree of psychological trauma that may come from pushing people to their limits. At the end of the day everyone can get up and walk away. Because of this, I would love to see a virtual recreation of the Stanford prison experiment, one of the most notorious experiments of all time. In the experiment, half of the participants were told they were prisoners, and the other half prison guards, and they were all put in a mock prison to act out their roles.
Within a couple of days these perfectly ordinary people had reverted to the sort of behaviour you expect to see from the roles they were taking on, the thing is these people weren't acting. The prisoners were dissenting, refusing to eat and even actively rioting, and the prison guards were using brute force, intimidation and violence to try and keep them in line. Even Dr. Zimbardo, who was running the experiment, got pulled in so deep he couldn’t pull himself out, and the experiment was forced to stop after less than a week. The sorts of psychological and physical trauma suffered are what stops these experiments from taking place, and rightly so, but such an experiment could reveal so much about power and corruption, and could lead to crafting a better, and safer, prison system. It also has implications for anyone in a position of leadership and how their position influences their behaviour. This of course begs the question, could such a test be done in a virtual world safely? Could we say, recreate the Stanford experiment in a safe way? Could we create two villages, one with food the other without, and see the same sort of behaviour from the experiment that we’d see in the same real-world scenario?
It’s all too much thinking!
Jamie out xoxoxo
Good blog as usual Jamie :) Does raise some questions and would like to see Minecraft used to build real life projects.
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