Posts Tagged ‘World of Warcraft’
Anonymity and Blizzard Forums
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on July 7th, 2010
Earlier this week Blizzard dropped a big AoE by announcing that it was greatly reducing user anonymity on its Starcraft II and World of Warcraft forums. Everybody who posts on those boards will soon have their real first and last names displayed. So Trolly McTrollpants will no longer be able to post under that name …unless that’s what it says on his credit card. Which seems doubtful.
(Update: A few days after making the announcement, Blizzard recanted due to rather loud and displeased reactions from players. They have noted, though, that they still have other plans for changing the behavior of their forum posters.)
Aside from wanting to make Battlenet (the system that handles matchmaking and other socially oriented tasks for players of Blizzard games) more of a social networking tool, the intent of this change seems to be to bail out some pretty nasty bathwater from the forums, even if that means a few smiling babies get tossed, too. Trolls, flames, and vitriol in 48 flavors seem to be a big problem in the official forums. Given WoW’s stupefyingly large player base, the company has too big a community, which is a weird but apparently real problem. I imagine its forum moderators and community managers are overwhelmed and this nuclear option of sharing real names is meant to do two things: 1) reduce the number of people using the forums, and 2) make people be nicer to each other by robbing them of their anonymity. I think it will succeed at both, though it’ll be a bumpy ride.
As I’ve written about before, anonymity has some well known psychological effects. People who feel like less of an individual because they’re an anonymous part of a group may be more likely to look to social cues and the behavior of other group members to determine their own behavior, and this often results in their being antisocial jerks. Reducing anonymity can in turn reduce this kind of behavior and make people a little more likely to be courteous and hold their tongue if that’s how they’d behave in face to face interactions. So I think Blizzard is likely to see results from this. It’ll also be magnified by the number of thoroughly anti-social jerks who withdraw from the forums entirely because they don’t want to risk reprisal for their actions.
(Personally I think they’re making the right move, though it’ll cost them. Also among those leaving will be those who value their anonymity for other reasons –because they’re women who don’t want to deal with other players’ knowing it, because they don’t want others to know about their hobby from a Google search, or because of any other plausible reasons. But I guess that Blizzard has done the social arithmetic and decided that those are acceptable losses in the face of making their forums usable.)
What’s fascinating to me, though, it to wonder how Blizzard might be trying to measure the impact of this decision internally. I mean, technically Blizzard isn’t really doing anything to increase accountability for your posts; they’re just changing the social and psychological context. If I were working there and put in charge of this task, I’d first identify some metrics that would be of interest. Some of them are no brainers, like the number of new posts/replies and new account registrations. But you could get creative, too. You could look at random posts and get measures of how frequently certain words are used, ranging from rude phrases (“stupid” “shut up” “noob” and the like) to curse words and euphemisms for curse words. Maybe you’d want to look at average word count per post, too, since derogatory and pithy one-line replies might be less frequent than more thoughtful replies. There are probably already lots of existing models of verbal aggression out there in the psychology literature that you could draw from to make your predictions.
Once I had those metrics figured out, I’d ideally do a phased rollout of different forums or different regions that would allow me to have a control group under the status quo and an experimental group that gets the Real ID treatment. You could then collect data for a week or a month, then compare the two groups on those metrics. Or, if you just had to do a simultaneous rollout of the changes across the board (pardon the pun) then you could use archival data to do before/after comparisons.
So there you go, Blizzard, if you’re not already doing something along those lines, you should and you should even look to publish it in one of the new academic journals addressing video games and electronic media. People have been hypothesizing about this stuff before, but nobody has ever had a chance to actually test it on this scale. My consulting fee can be paid in purples and epic mounts.
The Status Quo Effect (Or, Pay Without Play)
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on April 13th, 2010
Note: This article appeared as my column on GamaSutra and GameSetWatch.
Many of us have been surprised in spite of ourselves when one day we looked up and realized that we’ve been paying for a MMO like World of Warcraft when we haven’t logged on for months. Or maybe we’re reading our e-mail and we get a cheerful note from Microsoft saying that our Xbox Live Gold account has automatically renewed and the charge applied to our credit card. And still we don’t do anything about it. Why not?
Before I explain, consider this graph, showing the participation rates of two groups of employees at an actual Fortune 500 company in a 401(k) savings plan. (For those who don’t know, a 401(k) savings plan lets employees automatically sock away part of each paycheck for retirement. They offer lots of benefits and participating in them is generally a smart thing to do if you don’t want to die of old age on the job.)
Today's kids love hearing about 401(k) savings plans, right?
Can you guess as to why only 49% of people in Group A decided to save for retirement while a comparatively larger 86% of Group B members decided to save? Maybe Group B is full of MBAs, economists, or self-aware computers who are more rational than the drunken chimps in Group A? Nope. Maybe Group A is full of young whippersnappers unconcerned with retirement while Group B is comprised of old geezers? A better guess, but still incorrect.
These groups were actual subjects in a 2001 study by Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea, two economists interested in what happened when a tiny but important change was made to the paperwork related to the 401(k) plan.1 The only difference between the groups was that the paperwork for Group A required new hires to actively sign up for the savings plan, while the paperwork for Group B automatically enrolled new hires into the savings plan unless they overrode that decision. In other words, people tended to go with the default choice –”Don’t Participate” for Group A and “Participate” for Group B– and the suckers in Group A saved less because they couldn’t be bothered to check one box on one form.2
Psychologists have a term for this reluctance to change from our previous or default decisions: “the status quo effect.”3 Most television programmers use it to glide you from one show to the next, using an established hit with a strong viewership to build an audience for whatever comes after it. It’s even gotten to the point where you move seamlessly from the end of one show to a quick intro to the next without even pausing for a commercial break. Because once they start, most people will continue to watch even though switching to something else is trivially easy.
This is, of course, the same reason why gaming companies prefer that you sign up for an automatically renewing service instead of using prepaid subscription or point cards. It’s also the reason that rental services like Netflix or GameFly offer “Free Trials” that will roll into paid subscriptions if you don’t actively cancel. They even spin it as a benefit: “If you are enjoying Netflix, do nothing and your membership will automatically continue…”
But it’s also important to be aware of the fact that the default choices you’re presented with when signing up for a new service4 have much the same effect as the status quo bias. Let’s stick with GameFly and consider this screenshot from the sign-up process:
Oh, which to click?
Notice which option is checked by default: the most expensive one. That’s not by accident. HTML technology is sufficiently advanced so that they could easily have had NO plan chosen by default and could instead require you to make your choice in order to proceed. Instead, they’re taking advantage of the status quo effect and probably getting more people for the $12.95 plan.
Hey, look, Netflix does the same thing!
Hey, cut that out!
Similarly, “Opt out” options are popular among marketers because many people don’t bother with the almost effortless task of unchecking some boxes so that they don’t receive spam or avoid installing some obnoxious toolbar in their web browser.
But you guys, wait! The status quo effect only gets more potent when the task you’re faced with is more difficult or cognitively demanding. In a recent article for Psychology Today, psychologist Kelly McGonicgal discusses some research5 that addresses the neuroscience of how this all works. Subjects in this study were asked to make difficult calls about whether a tennis ball was in or out of bounds, but for each trial one of the two possible calls was randomly made the de facto default choice. You can probably head me off at the pass and figure out that people tended to stick with the randomly assigned default choice, even more so when the call was difficult. And according to McGonigal, even considering going against a default choice seemed to increase the activity in the prefrontal cortex (an area associated with decision-making) and increased exchanges between that area and the subthalamic nucleus, a chunk of gray matter associated with motivated behavior. In other words, evaluating something besides a default options literally requires more mental energy.
The status quo effect can work to our benefit, though, as we saw in the 401(k) savings example above. Many games feature built-in tutorials, tooltips, or other pointers for novice players. Often these assists can be turned off, but they are almost always “on” by default because even if you ,make players aware of them, most would probably not bother turning them on if they were off by default and frustration would ensue. For example, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games don’t present tutorials to new players by default. This always seemed weird to me, and I swear I made it through most of the first Guitar Hero without ever knowing about hammer-ons and pull-offs because I had skipped the tutorial.
So beneficial situations aside, how do you guard against the status quo effect when you don’t want it unduly influencing your behavior? For starters you can use prepaid subscription cards instead of automatically renewing subscriptions. I renew my Xbox Live Gold membership each year by using such a card, which has the added benefit of letting me buy the cards when they’re on sale and hold on to them until needed. Heck, even Zynga of Farmville fame is selling prepaid game cards now.
Beyond prepaid cards and canceling free trials before they morph into a paid subscription like a Zerg larvae, just make sure you take the time to look carefully at default options the next time you’re filling something out or agreeing to a terms of service. Especially when it’s a cognitively demanding or confusing task, as that’s when you’re most likely to succumb to the status quo effect. Consider: are those default choices what’s best for you? SPOILER ALERT: no, probably not.
Footnotes:
- Madrian, B. & Shea, D. (2001). The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 4, 1149-1187.↩
- Actually, it’s not quite that simple, as the study found that new hires also stuck with the default 3% savings rate, while those who actively had to choose their savings rate tended to set aside a higher percentage of their pay. But it’s true in the general case, and if the default had been 6% instead of 3% then they would have saved that much more.↩
- Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books.↩
- or even a 401(k) savings plan↩
- Fleming, S.M., Thomas, C.L., & Dolan, R.J. Overcoming status quo bias in the human brain. PNAS. Published online before print March 15, 2010. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910380107↩
Framing and World of Warcraft’s Rest System
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on March 16th, 2010
One of my favorite things about human psychology is how a punishment can be turned into a reward just by changing the way it’s framed. A few years ago a friend of mine was serving on the board for a large conference and negotiating a contract with the hotel where the event would take place.1 Part of the contract dealt with giving hotel room discounts to a limited number of attendees, but they were first come first served, after which the room price would go up. My friend wrestled with how to present this to attendees, grumbling about how he was having to tell people he was punishing them by raising the prices if they made last minute plans to attend the conference.
“Dude,” I said, ’cause I really do say things like that, “It’s not a penalty for late registration, it’s a reward for people who register early.” And with that, the wording on the conference registration changed from “late registration fee” to “early registration discount.” And nothing else changed, except that people probably thought it was more fair.
Word of Warcraft framing. Get it? Eh? Eh? Eh, yeah, you're right, it's not that funny.
In a recent episode of the nifty Idle Thumbs podblast2 Gamasutra’s Chris Remo articulated another great example of this kind of simple framing in how World of Warcraft’s “rest bonus” system came about:
In World of Warcraft what they did when they first designed the game was they had an experience system that would, over time, lower the amount of experience you got because [Blizzard] wanted to encourage people to play for like two hours at a time instead of twelve hours at a time. So the longer you played you’d get this experience degradation and then it would bottom out and at that point it would be a fixed rate of experience. And people just hated it.
And so they went back and [Blizzard's Rob Pardo] was like allright, basically what we did was we made everything in the game take twice as much experience to achieve as before and then we flipped it. So actually what happens is you start getting 200% experience and eventually it goes back down to 100%. So that effectively now how they spin it is that if you log out for a while you get this 200% boost when you log back in! And then over time it goes away and you just get regular 100% experience. It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like “Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!”
So, in other words, people hated the system when it was presented as a penalty for playing too long at a stretch, but they loved it when it was framed as a reward for taking a break. Even though the results were exactly the same. Such is the magic of framing.
Footnotes:
Picking Your Guildies: The Role of Attraction, Selection, and Attrition
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on March 10th, 2010
What leads gamers to join one guild in a massively multiplayer game or one clan in an online shooter over another guild or clan? Why do you post on the gaming messageboard that you do as opposed to one of the other countless alternate ones? And once you’re in a group, what kind of things make you leave?
Industrial-organizational psychologists, who use the tropes of psychology to study people in the world of organizations and work,1 have come up with a lot of theories on why people choose to work for one company over another, why they leave, and how those things affect the “culture” of the place –the shared understanding of what is expected and rewarded within that group. Some of these models lay more credit at the feet of organizational structures, and some credit the environment. But another view known as the Attraction-Selection-Attrition (ASA) model,23 says that it’s the people that determine the culture of whatever organization you’re looking at, be it guild, clan, messageboard, or mod team.
In brief, ASA says that it’s the people in the group that define the culture4 , not just the environment, structure, or rules of the game. It does this through a three-step cycle:
- New members are attracted to the group by what they perceive to be similarity in values, goals, and interests
- When petitions are made for membership, the gatekeepers in the organization select would-be members based on who is most similar to them
- Attrition happens when people who don’t fit in so neatly after all find better things to do than hang out and deal with the guild drama
Figure 1: The ASA cycle. Also, this whole thing is moderated by lolcats. Somehow. Science is still working on that part.
This isn’t exactly mind blowing, but it has implications if you think it through. One being that it explains the three-pronged mechanism by which cohesive, like-minded groups of people develop over time. People that are at odds with the culture within the guild or clan tend not to want to be a part of it. And if they do, they tend not to be selected for membership. And if that happens, they tend to rage quit over time.
For example, back when I was playing lots of Team Fortress 2 I hung out a lot with guys from a website called “Portal of Evil.” These were guys who ran goofy game mods, played on experimental and occasionally awful maps, and who broadcasted obnoxious music and trash talk over allchat. I played with them regularly because I thought all of this was hilarious and fun. But if hadn’t wanted my Engineer wearing a jaunty party hat or couldn’t tolerate hearing “Baby Got Back” on allchat FOR THE FIFTIETH TIME THAT NIGHT, I would have found someone else to play with or been mocked for complaining.
Likewise, guilds in massively multiplayer games are sometimes interesting in how they evaluate petitions for membership. A friend of mine who wanted to join a hardcore raiding guild in World of Warcraft once described this process as an audition where he was grilled about his play style and history, his character build, his equipment, and how many hours a week he was willing to devote to to the guild. He was then taken along on an actual raid where the guild’s recruiter used UI mods to track his performance in the game along very strict measures to see if he could properly play his role. In the industrial-organizational psychology parlance, we call that kind of thing a job interview and a work sample test. It’s exactly the kind of thing that the “S” part of the ASA model describes. (And if you, dear and handsome reader, have personal experience with this kind of thing, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.)
What’s even more interesting to me is to consider is how game designers and community managers might use something like this model to guide their efforts if community is a big part of their game.
First, the ASA model points to providing players with tools that they can use to communicate their goals, values, and desires to each other. Allowing players to formulate and share a charter that signals these things would be great, as would communication channels like messageboards and private chat to which prospective members could be invited to eavesdrop. Statistics about guild/clan activities could also provide a strong signal –things like rankings, achievement counts, manhours played, headcount, or other metrics could be invaluable to people shopping for a group to become part of.
And this information works both ways –people who aren’t as into PvP combat could self-select out of the process while those who are will find it easier to find guildies who share those values. Heck, what if you borrowed another idea from the world of Industrial-organizational psychology and allowed players to submit anonymous responses to standardized surveys asking about what values their guild or clan holds? “On a scale of 1 to 5, my guild is forgiving of people who miss scheduled events.” Useful.
Game developers might also want to provide tools that team leaders can use to evaluate potential members. Gameplay stats and standardized application blanks could be really useful, as could be information on complaints filed against that person by other players. If you provide a useful tool, players won’t have to rely on third-party tools. Or maybe THAT IS your plan, and you can facilitate it by providing data and APIs upon which players can build.
The point is that both current and potential group members are going to be looking for information about those shared expectations (i.e., organizational culture) in order to make decisions about each point in the Attraction-Selection-Attrition cycle. To the extent that a game or a service outside of a game facilitates that, people will find it useful.
Footnotes:
- Hey, I’m one of them guys!↩
- Schneider, B. (1987). The people make the place. Personnel Psychology, 40, 437-453.↩
- Schneider, B., et al. (1995). The ASA Framework: An Update. Personnel Psychology, 48, 747-761.↩
- it also acknowledges the disproportional weight of the organization’s founders in determining culture, but that’s another article↩
The Glitcher’s Dilemma: Social Dilemmas in Games
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on March 4th, 2010
Note: This article is also published in my columns on GameSetWatch.com and Gamasutra.com.
Soon after its release, some players of the online first person shooter Modern Warfare 2 discovered what became known as “the javelin glitch.” Someone, somewhere, somehow figured out that through a bizarre sequence of button presses you could glitch the game so that when you died in multiplayer you would self destruct and murder everyone within 30 feet, often resulting in a net gain in points. It wasn’t long, though, before the method for creating this glitch spread through the Internet and servers were filled with exploding nincompoops. In fact, it quickly got bad enough that developer Infinity Ward had to rush out a patch to fix it.
The javelin glitch presented players in the know with an interesting dilemma: they could either abuse the glitch to boost their own rankings and unlock new perks, or they could abstain and preserve the game’s fair play. Of course, the problem is that if they abstain, someone else may abuse the glitch and dominate the match. The middle ground is when everyone glitches, but the resulting pandemonium isn’t as much fun as fair play for most normal people.
Let’s simplify the discussion by assuming a two-player deathmatch game in Modern Warfare 2. Look, I’ve created a table to summarize the dilemma for you! It’s suitable for framing.
Figure 1: The Glitcher's Dilemma
So what do you do? Psychologists and economists who study this kind of decision-making call it a “social dilemma.” In these situations, intentional griefing notwithstanding, each person has what’s called a “dominating” alternative where they’re most likely to win (in this example, abusing the glitch) but most people REALLY want the “nondominating” alternative produced when everyone chooses to abstain from it. Especially once the novelty factor wears off.
Back in the 1960s research on these kinds of dilemmas exploded and out of it came what’s known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” based on an anecdote about getting confessions from two prisoners held under suspicion for a bank robbery. In his book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World1 Robyn Dawes summarizes the classic scenario thusly:
Two men rob a bank. They are apprehended, but in order to obtain a conviction the district attorney needs confessions. He succeeds by proposing to each robber separately that if he confesses and his accomplice does not, he will go free and his accomplice will be sent to jail for ten years; if both confess, both will be sent to jail for five years, and if neither confesses, both will be sent to jail for one year on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. Further, the district attorney informs each man that he is proposing the same deal to his accomplice.
Here are those choices in table form:
Figure 2: The prisoner's dilemma
In this case, both prisoners will probably confess if they’re rational about it. Why? Because each prisoner get a better (or no worse) payoff by confessing no matter what the other guy does. Prisoner A thinks, “I don’t know what B is going to do, so if I confess it’s the best way to keep myself from getting screwed. If he keeps quiet, I go free. If he also confesses, I get 5 years instead of 10.” In other words, confessing is the only way to keep the other guy from being able to screw you over. Notice how this mirrors the javelin glitch dilemma, only with fewer explosions.
Now let’s take another example from the golden years of PC gaming. In the early days of Starcraft, a strategy called “Zerg rushing” emerged where at the beginning of the match players would quickly build lots of cheap Zerg units to overwhelm opponents before defenses could be constructed. Counter strategies developed,2 but for a good chunk of the player base Starcraft became a game of seeing who could Zerg rush faster, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as choosing from any other number of play styles or even races. So the dilemma was:
Figure 3: The ...Zerg dilemma?
Again, the dominating strategy was to Zerg rush, because if you didn’t and the other guy did, you lost, which was worse than any of the alternatives. This despite the fact that what you really both want is a varied, fun game. It’s a design issue that still plagues strategy game developers today.
Prisoner’s dilemmas and social dilemmas in general can similarly be used to illustrate the reasons for “ninja looting” in World of Warcraft where one player exploits the “need/greed” loot distribution system to get a piece of equipment:
Figure 4: Oh, you know what? Forget it.
Or you could apply it to “tick throwing” and “fireball trapping” techniques in fighting games. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. My 2×2 table making machine burnt out, anyway.
What’s really more interesting and useful, though, is to look at what psychology has to show us about when people DON’T choose the purely rational option of abusing a glitch or a winning but boring strategy. Generally, people are more likely to do this when:
- They know they will be playing against their opponents in the future and face retribution
- They expect to interact with their opponents outside the game
- They don’t expect to remain anonymous
- They don’t know how many games will be played with the same person
Under these conditions, many players will adopt a strategy where they cooperate at first (for example, they don’t glitch or rush), then if the other player abuses that trust they retaliate in kind. This is known as the “tit for tat” strategy. Some researchers with lots of time on their hands even organized tournaments where people were invited to write computer programs to play iterated prisoner dilemma games, and the programs that adhered to the “tit for tat” strategy tended to do the best.
This is why things like playing with people on your friend’s list, Steam community group, guild/clan, or a favorite dedicated server is good. And it’s one reason why random matches between strangers or pickup groups can be infuriating. Making it easy to submit ratings to the profiles of people you just played also helps resolve these dilemmas to everyone’s benefits. It’s also the reason that I love the way that Halo 3 lets you remain in a lobby with the people you just played and go straight into another round with them.3
People being the complicated beings they are it’s not a perfect system, though. Some people are just griefers out to disrupt the game no matter what. Some people won’t abuse a glitch out of a sense of honor. Some will value their ranking on a leaderboard more than a sense of fair play for any individual match. But even if none of the suggestions above is a silver bullet, they help across large numbers of games.
Footnotes:
- 1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers.↩
- as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe↩
- Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that↩
How Social Identity Theory Predicted the Console Wars of ’07
Posted by Jamie Madigan in Articles on January 11th, 2010
Fanboys. You don’t have to be a very experienced browser of gaming-related forums to see your share of discussions fouled by flames between people hysterically defending their favored game/console/genre/whatever and attacking everything else in sight. Some of it is deliberate trolling, for sure, but not always. There were (and still are) way too many Xbox owners ready to point and laugh at the Playstation 3′s lack of games. Or good luck trying to find someone who will stand up as a fan of BOTH Halo AND Killzone.1
Why do gamers do this? One word: “social identity theory.”
Typical Fans
This theory explains (or at least predicted) the Great Console Wars of today and tomorrow. In one study, psychologist Henry Tajfel and his colleagues brought together teenage boys2 and asked them to express preference for one of two sets of paintings, saying that their choice would place them in one of two otherwise arbitrary groups. Thus sorted, the boys then participated in a separate study where they distributed (fake) money to their fellow subjects under a variety of conditions. But here’s the key: each boy was told whether those to whom he was doling out the virtual cash were in “his” group or in the “other” group.
I’ll bet you can guess the results: subjects showed stark favoritism for people who had liked the same set of paintings as they had and who were thus in “their” group. Remember that like messageboard denizens, these kids had absolutely no self-interested reason to do this –they weren’t rewarded for favoring their group and they weren’t given any reason to expect their fellow group members to return the favor and be best friends forever. They just did it because they considered those strangers to be “us” and –perhaps more importantly– the rest to be “them.”3
Tajfel and his collaborators theorized that people have a natural tendency to construct identities based on group membership. Part of who you are –and how you communicate that to others– is defined by what groups you belong to. And we naturally want to belong to high-status groups, right? Okay, fine, but everything is relative; a group isn’t high status unless there’s a low status group for it to be contrasted against. So not only do some people identify themselves as Xbox fans, they attack Playstation owners in order to raise their status. This tendency is human nature, the researchers concluded, and a lot of other data support them. What’s more, we’re perfectly willing to do it at the drop of a hat.
Some savvy game designers even build this kind of thing into their game, the biggest example being Blizzard’s long-standing “Horde vs. Alliance” rivalry in World of Warcraft. Some folks will roll toons on either side of the divide, but many hardcore players will vigorously stick to just one side, and Blizzard happily plays this rivalry up in the player versus player aspects of the game.
One of the most interesting uses of social identity theory I’ve seen, though, was pulled off by Valve Software during their recent “Demoman versus Soldier” event for Team Fortress 2.
Valve uses social identity theory for fun and profits
Harnessing their flabbergasting ability to track gameplay stats through Steam, Valve promised a new in-game weapon for the class (Demoman or Soldier) that scored the most overall kills against his opponent during a certain time frame. The results were nuts as people chose sides, let rockets/stickies fly, and created renewed buzz for the game.4
I think the Soldier explained it best on the Official Team Fortress Blog:
Gentlemen, I have NO IDEA what this weapon is. I don’t even know if I’ll WANT it. But BY GOD, I know what’s IMPORTANT, and it’s that WE get it and the DEMOMAN DOES NOT.
This is psychological warfare at its finest.
Footnotes:
- And don’t even get me started on the whole “table versus jetski” debacle.↩
- There’s the bulk of your console war soldiers right there, in fact.↩
- Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149-178.↩
- In case you were wondering, Soldier won the shootout, but just barely –6,372,979 Soldiers gibbed vs 6,406,065 Demomen.↩
