Game Theory: Theorists are KILLERS (Life is Strange)

This video contains spoilers for "Life is Strange." Lots and lots of spoilers. You have been warned. Life is about choices. Coca Cola or Pepsi? Batman or Superman? Euthanize your best friend or kill her father? Hope for? ♪ Game Theory Intro Music ♪ Hello Internet! Welcome to

game

theory

. The cool program for statistical analysis of video

game

trends. Well... cooler. Speaking of statistical analysis, this episode is made possible by... you, about 25,000 of you. You guys helped get today's data, which is great. Scientists would kill for so many volunteers. In other words, you guys are amazing! And science? You can take a cue from this.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you know GTLive, you may have seen our 10-part series on Life is Strange, which was our most requested game so far. If you're not familiar with the game, you can watch our series here. Enjoy the stories about koalas! See you at 8 pm. But for those who don't want to waste a day staring at my head on the couch, Life is Strange is kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure book with an emo twist. The game is about a girl named Max who studies photography at a school in Oregon.

On top of that, you can make all kinds of decisions for Max. From watering the plant in her dorm room to signing petitions. *horn shots* SUPER EXCITING GAME But this game is much more than making Polaroids of everyday things, which you then put a filter on and post on Instagram as #art. The twist is that Max discovers that she has the power to rewind time and undo her mistakes, which comes in super handy since her best friend, Chloe, has a bad tendency to die. Um, oops, I shot the bumper of a car for no reason and the bullet ricocheted back to me.

Oh no! I was resting on the train tracks and got stuck...again. Oh darling! I wonder what happens when I try to track down a serial killer without notifying the police. Oh my god, Chloe! Max is constantly dividing up the space-time continuum so you can spit on natural selection. The least, THE LEAST, you can do is not provoke the armed drug dealer, okay? Oh! And they shoot him again in the bathroom. Awesome. The choices become increasingly difficult and intense until, towards the end of the game, you no longer have to make decisions that fit into the black and white categories of right or wrong.

At the end of each chapter, you will be able to compare your choices with those of other players. From "Did you steal money for disabled children" to "Were you able to stop your sexually assaulted girlfriend from jumping off a roof?" By the way, can I just say how emotionally unprepared I was to take the Does my gamer girlfriend's

life

depend on my choices? That was very serious. Tumblr shoots up the word level seriously. I miss the days when the most intense thing in a game was hitting someone with a red shield right before the goal. But of all the options in the game, the last one really caught my attention.

After spending 19 hours with your former best friend, Chloe, including midnight pool parties, morning dances, shared kisses, and heart-to-heart conversations, you must choose whether to sacrifice her

life

. At this point you have already saved his life 5 times. And much, much more if you really had a hard time stopping the train. But that whole Back to the Future thing wasn't really good for the universe. A huge tornado is about to destroy the entire city, and Chloe is sure that the only way to prevent it is to go back in time and have her die at the beginning. This will restore the timeline.

And that's your last choice in the game: sacrifice your best friend to save an entire city, or let the entire city and all its people get sucked into the tornado to let your best friend live. The end. That's it for the end, everything is fine. A better title would have been "Life is Emotionally Exhausting." At our departure, I may have gotten a little emotional, but those were the manliest tears. What can I say? In the end it involved all Life is Strange players, 53% of people chose to sacrifice Chloe and 47% to sacrifice the city. That's just more difference than the flip of a coin was curious about. at the end of the game?

And one step further, would you, the theoretical family, be more likely to opt for a particular option? The answer was an obvious yes. Apparently,

theorists

have more in common than going crazy over FNAF. Approximately 25,000 responses were submitted, with over 72% of you choosing to sacrifice Chloe's game. And the obvious follow-up question is: Why are we seeing this? Why are our results so different from the rest of the gaming community? So I started looking more closely at the data. The trend also applies in terms of gender. Women who took the survey chose to sacrifice Chloe a little more than 75% of the time, while men did so 71% of the time.

And what about age or nationality? Well, while we couldn't get many people in their 50s and 60s out of their FarmVille addiction, the viewers of this channel are of very different ages and nationalities. So that didn't play much of a role either. But what was it? Why do

theorists

so clearly opt for the sacrifice of their best friend, while the rest of the gaming public is so divided on the matter? And that's where the last survey question comes in handy. Although not many philosophers ask what drives a player's choice in Life is Strange, these kinds of questions have long been pondered in the study of ethics.

In 1967, British philosopher Phillippa Foot came up with a similar problem called the trolley problem. It goes like this: A car is moving on the rails towards 5 workers and the workers cannot get out of the way in time. However, there is a switch that sends the cart down an alternate path toward a worker. Would you flip the switch in this situation? Would you do it? You could do that? Because according to research, about 90% of people say yes. This choice is framed under the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism, in which the best action is the one that leaves the greatest number of people unharmed.

It's like a math problem. If someone has to die, it is better to save 5 than just one. And that's probably why most of us decided to put Chloe down. We value the lives of hundreds of people more than just one. It's like, will you press the button? But of course that's not all. In the tram problem, there is no difference between the two groups of workers except the number. But Life is Strange adds the disadvantage that the one we have to sacrifice is our best friend. And that makes a big difference. In a variation of the tram problem, the train still moves toward the 5 people, but can be stopped by pushing a fat person onto the track.

No joke, this is a serious ethical question that philosophers debate. They clearly have too much time on their hands. ''Okay, in this scenario there is a fat boy'' ''In this scenario there are 20 puppies'' ''And in this scenario it is an oversized Fig Newton'' Chapeau, philosophers, chapeau. Anyway, the utilitarian math of this version is the same as the previous one: sacrifice one person to save 5. But people react very differently to this version. In fact, most people say they won't push the man onto the tracks. In other words, the single change of having to push the person onto the track changes the responses from 90% who are going to stop the train, to less than 50%.

And if you think about it, the same goes for Life is Strange, where you, the player, must physically choose to rewind time, like Max, to restore the timeline to what it originally was. But why is this such a big change? Well, a researcher named Joshua Greene used fMRI to measure brain activity in test subjects during the two dilemmas. Although the fMRI showed much more activity in the rational parts of the brain when you can simply flip the switch and therefore kill less personally, in the second scenario, where you physically push someone on the track, it is the system limbic the one that lights up. ; the part of the brain that evokes emotions.

Since you are in a situation where you are physically killing. This is known as rule utilitarianism. The idea that following a certain sequence of ethical rules is the correct solution in any situation. In this case, the ethical rule is: do not push people in front of moving trains. I think it's very good advice. I'm not speaking from my own experience or anything like that. Going back to Life is Strange, the people who save Chloe are more likely to be government utilitarians. They probably make their decisions under the concept that a person should do whatever is necessary to protect their loved ones.

Well, it all makes sense, but why are theorists so much more willing to sacrifice Chloe? It turns out that theorists are not like the vast majority of the population. Of course, everyone knew that about me from the first time I wore a lime green suit in public. But it's good to know that you're by my side. As the last question on the survey, I asked people to quickly take the Myers-Briggs personality test, which classifies you into one of 16 different personalities based on a 4-letter code. This is an incredibly accurate test that, if you haven't taken it yet, you should.

There is a link in the description. It takes about 10 minutes maximum. People treat this as something sacred, including many companies that allow their employees to do this so they can better understand their work style. It's very cool. Anyway, the categories are like this: Number 1: Are you quiet and introverted or extroverted? Number 2: Do you prefer to use your mind to deal with a situation or do you prefer to look for patterns through intuition? Number 3: Do you make decisions by thinking about the situation or feeling what is right? And finally, would you prefer to plan your entire life in advance, which is called "critical" here, or would you prefer to stay relaxed and flexible, which is called "observe" here?

Take the first letter of your English words and you have your Myers-Briggs personality type. And this is where the theorists' data gets really interesting. When you look at the overall result, the first, third, and fourth letters are about a 50/50 split. For example: on average, 50% of people are introverts; stay home and play, while the other 50% are extroverted; go to parties and... do things that people do at parties. I play long games of competitive chess. But it's that second letter, reason vs. intuition, where there is a big, big difference. 70% of the world's population has "sense", they prefer reality or the information available to them in chunks.

The other 30% had "intuition" - people who look at examples from the past and draw patterns from them. They don't necessarily like looking at the past, but they do enjoy speculating about the future. But when I looked at the theorists' data, it was the other way around. 77% of you were intuitive and 23% were reason. Exactly the opposite of the world population. And although it may seem crazy, it actually makes a lot of sense. Take a look at the show you're watching right now. People with 'sense' probably hate me for doing this show. Because I apply science, math, and logic to video games, while the fact of the matter is that they are just games. "Rational" people see Mario as a hero because the games about him SAY he is a hero. ''He saves the princess'' is concrete evidence presented in bite-size form.

It is real. But people of "intuition" dare to speculate. They see past examples of Mario's bad behavior and see a pattern: Mario is crazy. Although this may not be the case and although there is much compelling evidence to the contrary, we at "intuition" enjoy speculating about it. Actually, it's quite curious. When I take this test, I often fall into an introverted and extroverted situation, and both feelings versus feelings. think. Strange enough, I have 4 different personalities. But I clearly fall into one of the other two, especially in the intuition category. This applies even outside of the show.

When I'm not writing scripts, I look at other YouTubers' data, try to find patterns in their views, etc. and I predict your future. But now let's look at our results with Life is Strange. People who are more N than S are more likely to rethink patterns observed in the past and think about the future when making their decisions. The same applies when choosing between saving or sacrificing Chloe. These two factors push you in a certain direction: sacrifice Chloe. The player, like Max, has seen the pattern of Chloe being practically a victim of the Final Destination. She's been destined to die this whole time, from Nathan shooting her to Frank shooting her.

Until Chloe shoots herself... And then the train and Mr. Jefferson... People who fall under intuition care more about that pattern than those of 'reason', who have much more interest in the past and their emotional history and their long friendship consu. The decision to sacrifice Chloe also has a lot to do with the future. Of course, Max has a richer history with Chloe than anyone else in Arcadia Bay.But those who lean more toward intuition overlook it and consider the consequences for many people, not just themselves and their loved ones. Isn't it great? And it doesn't stop there.

What else differentiates theorists? The most common combination was INFP; introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving. This personality type, called Mediator, was even 4 times more popular than the average type. As described by Mediators, INFPs combine, and I quote, "their intuitive nature with their open-mindedness to see things from unusual perspectives" and can, and I quote, "connect distant dots." Together, we've been connecting disparate dots for the past five years, bringing new perspectives to games. Seeing if we can prove that Link is dead, that Sonic is slow, that Peach is a maniac, or that Minecraft creepers are exploding swamp monsters. It should come as no surprise that theorists are the same.

On the list of fictional INFPs, one of the most well-known is Fox Mulder from the series "I don't want to get too kumbaya about this, but what brought us to this channel is not just our love for video games, it's that we reach out to the world with the same creativity, the same desire to find meaning in unlikely places. So even if we have to make an impossible decision, the life of our best friend versus the lives of innocent

strange

rs we consider the same points and, by a pretty solid margin. , we make the same decisions. And it's good, if you think about it, that thanks to the power of the Internet, we all managed to find each other, united by our way of thinking, without even realizing it. !

That's just a

theory

, a game theory! Thanks for watching :) Before you go, click the link in the description or this new annotation that works on both desktop and mobile devices to see my collaboration with Sam and Nico from Corridor Digital. If you're not familiar with this channel, I've wanted to work with them for a long time. These two guys are some of the best game-based virtual effects artists on YouTube, so I'm really excited about this video, I think you'll like it. The video is sponsored by the game Battleborn, which if you haven't heard of it before, is A Hyperactive Baby from Borderlands and Team Fortress 2.

You can play as anything from a vampire to a robot penguin. And the game is already over. It's almost like we planned it that way...hmm? The game contains the same humor as games like Tales from the Borderlands, but none. Something that Corridor Digital shows in its video: ''You, you're pretty hot now'' ''But I don't need a thermal camera to know that! OOOOOH! “Please click on it and check it or something.” It only takes 3 minutes and I want those kids to like me. That's why I want to earn your friendship with views. So by clicking, you will not only see a nice video, but you will also help me get more friends.

Friends are fun. Even if you have to bribe them to do it. Until next week!