A few months ago I wrote an article for GamePro magazine about what effects deindividuation and anonymity had on gamers. For those of you who aren’t subscribers or who didn’t pick up the magazine, GamePro recently published the article on their website for your clicking pleasure. I turned Bobo the Quote Monkey loose on the…
Back in January 2010 when I launched this site, I laid out the things it could lead to on a continuim from low to high. On the low end was “Nobody likes it, everybody dies.” On the very top of the high end was “Book deal, everyone lives” and close behind that was “Someone hires…
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…
While doing research for an article on the effects of anonymity on player behavior, I came across a fascinating study that I couldn’t find a place for in that piece, but which I wanted to share somewhere. In an article appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology cultural anthropologist R. J. Watson considered…
What makes people be such jerks in online games and messageboards? And why do these kids keep stealing my Halloween candy? Wait, actually I think I remember reading something about this… Ah yes, a classic experiment done by Edward Diener at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues way back in the 1970s Little…