EVE General Discussion

Asking for morality in EVE is like asking people in Quake Live to shoot less. Forget about it.

people that require morality to extend towards fictional consequenceless environments such as games are too serious for life. Believe me, you'll only end up in tears at some point.

Give me one reason why reality should adapt itself to fit your vieuw? why should there be morality in a video game?

edit: the fact that one *can* learn from MMO's does not mean one *should*, or that such a game should be built around the morals you would personally like to teach. What's next? Sueing CCP to teach creationism in Eve Online?

Chess teaches a lot actually. How to balance tactical versus strategic demands of a situation. how to control terrain to reach your objective. How to psychologically abuse your opponent to achieve any of these ends. How to learn from your mistakes and adopt your opponent's strengths. When a sacrifice is valuable and when it is a waste of resources. How to manage your time. How to manage your opponent's time. How to carry a situation while maintaining your focus on the solution. Errm I play a bit of chess. It does not however teach morality....

If games were serious business as you imply Call of Duty would have pacifists and anti-war demonstrations. Actually BF3 just came out. You should try to start the Red Cross there. Join games and just run around trying to aid the injured while demanding nobody shoots you because you aren't a combatant. Sound silly? So does playing Eve and trying to influence others to obey their moral codes in a video game that flaunts your ability to do dastardly things.

There are many games that give the opportunity to act outside the morals that dictate your normal life. If your assertion was true we'd be having gun toting maniacs all over the place from what they "learned" from years of playing FPS games. Most of us have a healthy detachment between our real lives and fantasy. You should develop one too.

They maybe studying games and peoples behaviour in games, but I don't see how they can gain any real information as the information will be specific to people playing games.

People act differently when rules/laws are enforced compared to when there are no rules/laws enforced (not all people of course).

But playing a game and the behaviour ingame will be different again, because of one major issue, which is there's no face-to-face confrontation.

Morality is part of EvE.

But EvE is a role playing game, one that allows people to role play characters with varying level of morality.

If you take people's behaviour in the game as part of their RL morality you need to step back, and possibly seek professional help.

I role play a more or less good guy, which doesn't exclude that fact that I might be a massmurdering psycho i RL.

Do so its highly informative.

The reality isnt whether we deem the content as real or fantasy but that we deem the players and their ideas, thoughts, desires, wants, wishes, fears, like and dislikes as real things. And if your thoughts are deemed "real" entities then your actions, as extensions of your thoughts, are also real even if you apply them to an unreal situation such as the roleplaying aspects of what you consider fantasy gaming. As you are in essence roleplaying your character within the rules of the game.

Given that the advantage of using games, like experiments, is that the inhibitors or variables can be changed in a very specific sense and the resultant correlations, given the fact that we have access to the hordes of data, can be quantified very easily. So it makes games such as MMOs with a wide range of players, something thats needed to give a good statistical cross section of a populace, ideal to garner data.

Yes the addictive qualities and how games are being created to become more addictive is the topic of one of the TEDs and a recent forum thread here. Again all from adults learning from the games and applying the data.

I would have to say how unfortunate for you and then I would suggest going beyond the set thinking of what your idea of learning consists of and going deeper into what the game holds for not just you as a person but for people in general. You might be amazed at what you can learn when you think about something a lil differently.

I disagree with this and this is where I see the data that they collect as unsafe data.

People do not always play their characters in a way that reflects what they're like in real life. Some characters are played to be an almost opposite (or mix) of what they're really like.

Fantasy is just that fantasy, if they try to extract real life answers out of fantasy, their results are likely to be the same too, just fantasy.

Nearly forgot this;

I don't generally have set ideas, they can and do at times evolve when new information comes to light (just like science). Information that proves the old ideas need modifying.

No your right but therein lies an interesting question on the human psyche. If you are playing a role other than what you normally are like in real life is that not too a portion of your real psyche? Honestly it is. But inhibitors within real life, consequences of actions, generally limit us from exploring these parts of our personas in anything other than in what you consider fantasy situations. Few carry through with these ideas but everyone has them to one extent or another. Within games you actually see a much truer nature of a person than you will in real life simply because the safety nets are taken away and you are given free range to do what you wish.

See theres something called the subconscious. Freud spoke of it immensely in his works. The idea of a Freudian slip, the subconscious desires coming through into the "real" world through the slip of a tongue. The idea of wanting to beat the idiot at the bank over the head in your mind but not doing so in real life. Both are real things, both 'thought' and 'action' are real. Neither can be classed as fantasy at all where a person is concerned. Its the same as when you drink or take drugs. They lower inhibitions in people much the same as anonymity and the freedom of a gaming world do. Allowing us to become different people than we would normally be. Yet there still must be a part of the desires within us to act this way even in uninhibited situations making that part of our persona or psyche just as real, just suppressed, as the rest of our psyches. But in gaming situations we get to see and even test and measure that.

That is REAL information and useful.

So the data isnt at all unsafe, its really on how your looking at it.