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As the world ends, will you lock arms and sing "Kumbayah" or embark on a path of law-breaking, anti-social behavior?
A new study, based upon the virtual actions of more than 80,000 players of the role-playing video game ArcheAge, suggests you'll be singing.
The study, conducted by a University at Buffalo-led team of computer scientists, will be presented next month at the International World Wide Web Conference in Australia. It found that despite some violent acts, most players tended toward behavior that was helpful to others as their virtual world came to an end.
Researchers acknowledge that the results have limitations -- namely that they are based upon a video game, not real life. Nevertheless, researchers argue that the study offers a realistic view into the behavior of people in an end-times scenario that is useful to both the game industry and other research communities.
"We realize that, because this is a video game, the true consequences of the world ending are purely virtual. That being said, our dataset represents about as close as we can get to an actual end-of-the-world scenario," says Ahreum Kang, postdoctoral researcher at UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the study's lead author.
What would happen if the world was ending? As with most questions in life, Nicolas Cage has already supplied us with the answer.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday March 23 2017, @12:44AM (1 child)
It depends on what the disaster is and exactly how it unfolds. Country folk can survive a week or two because they expect to have to endure a week long outage and over provisioning will get another week. But a lot of them depend on a generator to keep a freezer running as part of that survival plan for example, especially in the South where hurricanes are the expected disaster instead of snowstorms. What if the disaster is EMP? Or what if it isn't a weather event that impedes travel and the zombie hordes can get out of the cities? Or the disaster is a pandemic that shuts down all transport from fear of contagion? Now what happens if the disaster requires making it a year with little modern support, again use EMP as the example? 98% losses are now on the table as a probable outcome.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:54AM
I think it's a function of how those country folk are used to living. Farmers and ranchers would do fine. They know how to produce food from first materials and aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty. Many of them have also retained practices passed down from their grandparents like canning, salting, pickling, smoking, and preserving food. They know how to dig root cellars. They have folk remedies for common ailments. They know how to fish and hunt. Some of them might go even further and have solid, first-hand experience roughing it. There's even a decent chance they have old muscle-powered tools they inherited.
I know that if SHTF I'd rather take my chances among them than the people who live on my block in Brooklyn.
Washington DC delenda est.