Gamers are psychos

i think the point of that game is to get points by shooting and murdering people without remorse. if thats the point of the game you can only blame the developers and your self for having an unpleasant experience. the gamers are doing exactly what theyre supposed to.

He always gets fed a lot.

I'm not quite certain if he is a troll or if he really believes his own bullshit. Every time he comes up with a topic that many people disagree with, he continually ignores any and all points that he can't argue against, and straw-mans the ones that he can. Normally this would constitute a troll, but he seems pretty sincere about his ideas. When he isn't posting stupid shit like this, he seems to be an OK poster.

Red Dead is home to the most offensive and shocking thing I have ever experienced online. And I will tell its tale hear.

Within the first couple of online matches I was in, me and my team were subjected to this: One of our team mates started to get mad that we were losing. The usual complaints and hate speech... but then it got worse. A small child could be heard talking on his end, saying something like "Daddy, daddy what are you doing?" the man flew into a rage and a there was a loud crash and him yelling at the child to shut the F*** up. This went on for a minute or two before a woman's voice could be heard talking back to him and the child crying. There was the sound of things breaking and the man yelling more as the woman screamed in terror. This went on for several painful moments before the woman yelled she was calling the cops. I heard a loud slam, like a door slamming. His mic cut out. Me and my team had a quite moment and then all decided to leave the game.

I have never gone back to Red Dead's online since. The guy is still on my ban list.

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand or OP's post in anyway. Just thought I would put it out there.

The question is, why wouldn't they kill you repeatedly?

I'm amazed at the amount you've managed to write about something so completely ridiculous, if we were in the Old West I would shoot you so hard.

I wish there was a PvE option in RDR. The most fun I had with that game was riding around co-op.

Wait, there isn't is there? I only played the multiplayer back at launch.

It's all about the gaming context. Having played through Journey with complete strangers and had a great experience is at one end of the scale. But also having tried to survive in the DayZ wasteland only to be constantly gunned down by bandits who refuse to co-operate is at the other. It's all about the context.....

What's the point of connecting with people online only to not interact with them?

Killing is just so satisfying in most games.

Metro Last Light was trying to encourage me to play as a pacifist but it kept giving me so many cool silenced weapons that I just couldn't resist. Screw just watching the same knock-out animation every enemy.

Other than killing hostiles, I was an absolute saint, though. Still got the bad ending...

@legion_ Did you once hurt your ear with a que-tip?

@legion_: I understand where you are coming from but I think you just have the wrong idea. These people are probably dicks. But they are just trolls, trying to to get this exact response from them. It has nothing to do with their chosen hobby. They do it to piss you off. Its shitty and I think those people are one of the largest problems the internet has. They even treat friends like shit.

Freedom of the "do whatever the fuck without any consequences" variety makes people stupid. But that's just as true when a mother drinks with her underage daughter and never disciplines her or when dictators give authorities absolute power and immunity. It turns people into shitheads, to be blunt.

I have to say, anyone saying it's the same as a PVP server doesn't really understand how Read Dead works online. Even on an active PVP server, you have safe areas and allies. In RDR the lines are fuzzier and it is supposed to be a free roam. It can be PVP focused but to expect it just because PVP is enabled by default I believe is kind of silly.

There's a satisfaction in seeing the thing you shoot at fall over. It doesn't matter what it is, and it doesn't matter what you're shooting, be it a gun or anything else. Pointing at something, hitting it, seeing it react = good. It's that simple.

The people continuously killing your peaceful ass in RDR free roam is kinda parallel to all these people in this thread just stomping your balls and jumping down your throat, calling you wrong and delusional because you had an experiment and a following observation.

The reason is that it's a rarity to find someone who can fucking chill and listen/observe nowadays. We're on a speeding shaking train to hell where all we do is kill in games and all we do is bash and scrutinize on forums. No one wants to take a moment and try to think of whatever.

If I saw you in that RDR match I'd probably run towards you and start walking next to you, that's the way I usually am, I love finding unusual behavior in multiplayer games and cooperating with it or joining it. Not because I'm a hipster, but because it's unexpected and fun!

I have no doubt that there are connections between some real life behavior and some video game behavior, but not in this example, and certainly not enough to warrant a tsk tsk comment on the gaming community.

Never make eye contact with a gamer!

I always attack people who are just walking because fuck them and their fucking legs walking like they've got nowhere to fucking BE

It's so obvious he's trolling...

RPG servers. Have you looked into them? ARMA City Life, GTA 4, G-Mod, etc. There are tons of them on almost every PC game with a big multiplayer community and with a fair admin. "Gamers" are psychos? No, you're simply playing with the wrong crowd. Join a clan and stop playing with 12 year-olds.

You need to work on your experiments man. The only available player interaction in Red Dead is shooting guns. If you're not shooting guns, Red Dead becomes REALLY boring. So yeah. people will kill you in MP. Shocker.

You need to work on your experiments man. The only available player interaction in Red Dead is shooting guns. If you're not shooting guns, Red Dead becomes REALLY boring. So yeah. people will kill you in MP. Shocker.

There is no such thing as online co-op unless you are forced to do so. There isn't a tactical brain among them

This. This so much. You've got the right idea, man.

You began with a conclusion, and then set about finding the proper methodology to engender the results to your preference. You specifically went into a game in which competitive gunplay was a feature, in a game in which the gunplay is the core gameplay mechanic, and then refused to use the core gameplay mechanic and used this abnormal situation to inductively come to the conclusion that gamers are abnormal. To call that an experiment makes you a bad scientist.

You were killed 324 times in an hour? You realize this requires you to be killed five and a half times every minute? I'm not sure even if you spawned in directly in front of your killer's crosshairs, the game's loading and respawn times would make your supposed data completely improbable, if not clearly falsified. Tampered data in a so-called experiment makes you a bad scientist.

Your survey size of a single hour of a single game, and a single variant of gameplay, being used to draw conclusions of billions of hours spent playing thousands of games played by hundreds of millions of people is so far beyond extrapolative that it becomes completely farcical. Spoiled samples make you a bad scientist.

I've noticed just about every amateur who wants to do a 'social experiment' is completely scientifically illiterate. Did you ever wonder why sociology is considered a laughingstock of real scientists?

You know people shoot other people in real life withouth any provocation.

I really dont think that killing people presented as pixels in a game is the real issue.

I just read an article that said that there are over 300 million firearms in the united states. Over 30 000 people in a year are killed by firearms (United States). By real firearms not the imaginary ones in games.

@believer258: Interesting wiki article though this:

"The asynchronous nature of the Internet can also affect a person's inhibitions. On internet message boards, conversations do not happen in real time. A reply may be posted as shortly as several minutes; however, it may take months or longer for someone to post. Because of this, it's easier for someone to "throw their opinions out" and then leave; a person can make a single post that might be considered very personal, emotionally charged, or inflammatory and then "run away" by simply not logging in again. In this way, the person achieves catharsis by "voicing" their feelings, even if the audience is just as invisible."

Is kind of the opposite of what happens on internet forums, there's an obsession by most immature people to have the "last word" so they'll post incessantly as long as there's someone responding to them, even though typically past the first or second interaction these debates go wildly off topic and utilize ad hominem as much as possible et cetera; so a person "walking away" is actually demonstrating much more maturity and understanding of a situation than otherwise. A troll in the traditional sense isn't trying to make a point hence their only posting one response is inapplicable to the process. You'll see a lot of threads with just 2-4 people extending the thing incessantly and at some point no one else actually reads the thread and it just keeps getting bumped by shittier and shittier arguments.

@lastninja said:

I'm glad someone else noticed the similarities between these two hilarious threads.

SCIENCE!

It's a video game, that deals with shooting. You have to assume people are expecting another player to put up a fight at some point. I'm sure different games bring different reactions. Tell me what you'd do if you were on the other side? You would most likely do the same at some point. You've put too much thought in where thought isn't needed. If you find this to be some kind of interesting study the proves something, your thinking is flawed.

A test ≠ experiment. Where's your control group? What was your hypothesis? You jump to conclusions without any well thought-out analyses! You didn't use the scientific method at all! You're not a scientist, you're just a big, fat phony! PHONY!

What else is there to do in red dead redemption's free roam besides killing people while riding a donkey ?

Try dark souls

Whilst OP's point of trying to connect multiplayer game behaviors to real life doesn't carry much weight, I can see their point of it being a pain in the ass. To all the people saying that killing other players is the only activity, there are bandit hideouts that players can undertake. Imagine 16 human players going against a band of AI characters, it could be a fun experience, but if OP's "observations" are anything to go by, if I booted the game up right now wanting to do that, I couldn't. You could also get up to some dumb sandbox experiments as well. though I suppose that'd be better suited for a private lobby between good friends. It is a shame that people have reduced a free roam environment to deathmatch on a larger map.

As a Psychiatrist, your vast knowledge of the DSM and hundreds of case studies has led you to diagnose gamers, a group numbering in the hundreds of millions from countries, and backgrounds all over the world, with sociopathy?

Isn't it logical that since there is "basically no one" playing Friendly Free Roam, that there is "basically no one" interested in the play style that you're trying to enforce on the players in your little experiment? Furthermore did you even try to communicate (through voice chat or PSN messaging) your intended play style to the other players? If you did, what is their incentive to play in such a manner? If you didn't, then why are you expecting them to act in a manner not expected in the server?

I also find it quite telling that you think that because they're hunting you down over and over that it somehow indicates that they're psychos. In my eyes, they were trying to play with you. They're engaging in perfectly normal behavior, given the circumstances.

As this goes on (only read the first page) I can't tell if you're just joking around or not. It's a game, a western one at that. Westerns are about roaming the plains and getting in gunfights. That's the fun of it. You can free roam and kill people, if you don't want that, then like people have pointed out, there's a mode where they can't kill you. Go there.

The name of the thread was such so that people would take note. Call it some harmless sensationalism.

On a different note, I should have expected all the hostile comments in this thread. After all, this is a gaming site. Instead of coming with rational arguments, I get arguments like "no, you're psycho" and "it's normal to want to hunt people".

Gamers just can't seem to admit that there is a great cancer in our medium. It's a shame that the mass market appeal of the medium is basically to shoot people in the face. There's so much more we can do, but we settle for aggressive, anti-social interactivity with each other, and then go out of our way to call it normal behaviour. It's just so sad.

Only psychos play hide and seek. What's wrong with kids these last few centuries? Wanting to hunt people down like it's some sort of game!

This is a joke, right?

I'm a pacifist in real life. I deplore violence and guns. I even have issues treating spiders and bugs badly even if there are no laws or consequences to stop me from doing so, but in videogames I'll gank like a motherfucker if given the chance.

So you would find joy in hunting someone down, killing them over and over, just to detract from their experience? I think that's sosiopathic behaviour, even if done in a video game.

@legion_: I'm surprised anyone still plays that.

Anyway, I believe this is due to the way the game presents itself, not due to desensitization.

When the game first came out it made it clear how open the world was (in the multiplayer) and how you can choose to either make friends with people or... not. It warned if you didn't like this to play a private game.

The game insensitives you to do things and kill players I think gives a decent amount of XP, so naturally a certain group of people only do that. There is also very little reason to assume someone you don't know wants to play nice and you quickly learn no one seems to (want to play nice) so you also shoot everyone on site.

You actually see this in other games as well (such as Day Z) and I believe it is because the people who play these games are naturally assholes and have no intent on grouping with you to do a boring world mission when it's more fun to just kill you- it's not like they know you anyway.

Anyway, it doesn't have to do with desensitizing anything. The game sets the rules and tone (in that games case and a few others, there are really very few) and players follow suit. If they were desensitized they'd be shooting you down in the street outside your house. Interestingly enough, long before video games, they used to do just that, but let's pretend video games makes people desensitized shall we- it makes me feel better ;)

Anywho, It's why I very quickly stopped played RDR online. It's pretty lame if you aren't playing with friends.

Here's a real social test; attempt to get 16 strangers to co-operate in a single activity through nothing more than the power of suggestion. A 16 player raid on a bandit town could be a fun experience, and if you wanted to find 16 strangers to do it with you, it's either going to be in a game mode called Bandit Raid or on a server called [CO-OP ONLY]Bandit Raid 16 Players TKers Will Be Banned. The chance of getting strangers to do whatever it is you want without expressly entering a game mode that is exactly what you both want is minuscule. This has nothing to do with violence, sociopathy or anything else other than people choosing to spend their leisure time doing exactly what they want.

Actually, competition and conflict in various game scenarios is exactly normal behavior. It's what we've been doing for thousands of years. There's nothing 'social' about boxing or any physical sport, they are conflict guided by rules, just like free roam mode in Red Dead Redemption. You are choosing offense rather than rationality, mischaracterizing any disagreement you don't wish to actually deal with, and making outrageous claims that you can't back up even within the text body. Perhaps you should try a different tact than infantile moralizing and hand-wringing, it doesn't play here.

So let's say you walk into a chess club and start a game with somebody. Let's say you move your pieces around, making a very distinct moves that avoid capturing any of your opponents pieces. Your opponent then proceeds to checkmate you, over and over.

Would you consider your opponent to be engaging in sociopathic behavior? Would you actually say that your opponent is desensitized to violence? Would you say that this behavior truly shows what kind of person your opponent is?

And when people DO give a rational argument, you twist their words and intentions to make yourself sound good, ignoring any points they make.

On a side note, doesn't RDR have an achievement for tying an innocent bystander to the train tracks and watching them graphically explode under the train's wheels? Maybe you should be going on about that, instead of calling people sociopaths for not playing by a set of arbitrary rules you created in your mind before joining. In fact, since we're throwing diagnoses around, I'd consider your actions to be narcissism to the point of extreme, even dangerous, delusion. Not to mention the chronic hypocrisy (I'm willing to bet you've enjoyed a violent game here and there, RDR notwithstanding) and apparent inability to separate fiction from reality.

If it truly disturbs you so badly that people play shooters like shooters instead of like The Sims, maybe don't buy shooters? Your moral high horse doesn't have very strong legs when you're controlling a character that's carrying enough weaponry to take on the entire southwest, in a game where 95% of the gameplay is "kill those guys", by a developer who made their millions creating games in which you play as a horrifically violent criminal.

Yes.

@believer258: Legion has admitted to making up stuff just to get a rise out of people before. This is nothing new.

I'm sure many people have pointed out your fallacies at this point, and I'm sure you're just having fun anyway. (:

@legion_ said:

And you don't get what everyone else is saying who disagrees with you. And that's fine...no actually that's not fine. I don't condone willful ignorance. You have no intention of seriously engaging of the opposition whatsoever except to insult them and straw man their arguments to death. So I have no intention of treating you like an intelligent individual when you're clearly more interested in insulting everyone else's.

That explains a lot!