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Have you ever wondered how you would act at the end of the world? Players’ actions in a video game could reveal insights into how an impending apocalypse might affect people’s behaviour.

A team of researchers analysed how players behaved in a beta test of ArcheAge, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The players knew that all of their character information and progress would be deleted at the end of the test, which lasted about 11 weeks. This meant the researchers could watch how their actions changed as they got closer to the virtual world’s end.

ArcheAge, made by XL Games in South Korea, lends itself well to behavioural analysis because it is a wide-open “sandbox” game. This means that people have a large amount of freedom to explore a virtual world, rather than having to approach tasks in a linear fashion. In ArcheAge, players can build houses, have parties, learn a trade, spend money, kill people and advance through the ranks of complex guilds.

Researchers analysed 270 million records of player’s actions, with the data anonymised.

Apart from a few outliers who became more murderous towards the end of the test, they found that most players didn’t resort to killing sprees or antisocial behaviour as the game progressed. In fact, they tended to become more social. “They talk more, they hang out more,” says team member at Telefonica Research in Barcelona, Spain.

In general, players abandoned trying to advance their characters or complete quests. “People don’t really go off the deep end, they just stop worrying about the future,” says Blackburn.

Apple trees at the end of the world

This makes sense, says at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who studies the effects of video games. “There’s a big difference between planting an apple tree even when you know you’re going to die because then your kids can enjoy it, to the world is going to end and there will be no apple tree for anybody,” he says.

But studying behaviour in virtual worlds has certain limitations, such as that only some of it mimics real-life actions. For example, previous work has found similarities in virtual and real-world economic activity, but when a “virtual plague” was introduced into World of Warcraft, players ran around purposefully infecting each other, which real sick people don’t do.

Nevertheless, the virtual world offers one huge advantage to researchers: there is no real-life Armageddon to study. “You’ve got this immense power and control,” says Williams. “It’s a supercool tool.”

Next, Blackburn wants to use ArcheAge to explore behaviour in the area of criminal justice. The game’s sophisticated justice system, which wasn’t fully implemented in the beta test, includes player-run courts, punishments and jail time for characters.

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