From arras.io, we see fundamentals of human socialization. Children often have the same innate feelings as adults.
Clan Wars
Tanks can join a team and battle against other clans. Most people join one of the large clans that always seems to exist such as base or KPK. These people usually tend to be noobs that require protection in numbers. However, their clan is not coordinated and cannot easily destroy other teams.
But what is interesting is that technology allows players to duplicate themselves, such as the COOKER clan, which is all one person.
In society people group together to protect themselves but coordination costs arise. Will we see a one-person hegemon enabled by technology in the future?
Types of Players
- Noobs (easily killed and destroyed)
- Medium Skill
- High Skill
- Multiboxers, script writers, simply skilled at a certain tank
- Pets (somehow enjoy being ‘pets’ to others, like a jester)
In every game (Habbo Hotel, Transformice, Minecraft, etc.) I’ve played, there have always been a select group of skilled minigame players. I’d estimate it to be at around 5-10% of the population. Most other people do not have the performance mindset and prefer chatting with others. I suspect this generalizes to real life.
Servility and Independence
Some players are servile and always join the clan that is leading, as they know they are weak and want to feel part of something strong.
Other players are independent and will not join a noob clan such as base or KPK.
Naturally, any strong clan attracts noobs because they get shown in the leaderboard. Which leads to the downfall of the clan. Clans such as base have too much past inertia to ever completely disappear.
Chill or Kill
Players often say one of two things: peace or chill. The latter are strong players who choose to be peaceful and the former are weak players who might also say things like “plz no kill.”
Point Collectors and Killers
Some people tend to value having a high score. They are defensive players who care about their “number.” In real life, there might be people who are attached to their prestige, money, fame, or whatever other factor them deem important.
Then there are offensive players which simply care about killing as many other tanks as possible.
Some people value creating a base and staying in one place. Others value destroying it. Building is much more common than destroying, where the latter consists of a raiding clan like A-C that is like a pack of hyenas.
High Skill Gamemodes
Arms race vs regular gamemodes. Arms race has more variation in weapons. High skill gamemodes allow for skill expression. There is kind of a ‘natural selection’ and ‘diversity’ where certain tanks are good against other tanks. Auto-Cockatiel is a fast and high-damage tank often used by skilled players.
In regular gamemode, most tanks are all kind of weak, so it ends up one giant noodle fight. If you are skilled, pick high-skill gamemodes.
When weapons are of the “amateur” type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed hy citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an “amateur weapons system” (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such “specialist” weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will he established.
Quigley states that democracy rules when weapons are similar. Based on Arras’s regular game-mode, we see this is true (any player can dispatch any other unruly player).
Given that the internet increases variance and the world is so complex, the questions that should be asked are:
- How can we appease the strong and form alliances with them?
- How can we make sure we are not on the losing side?
- Is a mad scramble for power and ability necessary? Or can people live their own lives, unaffected by what goes on around them?
Winning in an existing world
“Growth” mode allows one to further upgrade their tank as they increase in score, making them stronger. I rarely see the highest skilled players in growth mode as this mode simply values persistence. Or do I not see skill because it is hard to have any skill in such a gamemode? It tends to be dominated by lower skilled players who have been playing the game a long time and have farmed their way into a big tank, making it near impossible for newcomers to defeat them regardless of their skill level.
While a skilled player could also compete in growth mode, it requires patience and planning and it’s easy to get crushed no matter how good you are. The tradeoff is not as immediate as when they go to a place where they can quickly dominate due to their skill.
If you’re the biggest in a clan, other players are more likely to follow you.
Arms Race Manhunt
Green represents the leader, who has stronger stats. In these situations there are not many people who will try to usurp the leader. A lot of them just fall in line and camp in the base. It is easy for a small group of people to control the entire base without much resistance.
From this I see that two principles are true: a lack of hierarchy leads to anarchy and infighting as people fight to become the next leader. Second, that replacing the leader in a revolution often inspires revolt against you because people are familiar with the existing leader and have group feelings and affections for them.
The leader can usually kill newcomers and a few other players as long as they don’t start trying to kill everybody. And if they say something in the chat to make others think that the killed deserved it, they can easily maintain their power for a long time.
People will still form groups in a gamemode such as Maze and hang out if everyone is equal, but it’s hard for people to control and exploit others if there is not inequality. Since there are factors that put one human above another, the perennial human question is what to do about that fact.
The developer implemented something to stop this “basing” in Arms Race Manhunt. They tried to force their own vision onto what a gamemode should be rather than understanding emergent nature and the tribal nature of humans.
Dynamical systems
I’ve been thinking about how given varying stages of life and different beginnings, people evolve toward similar defined outcomes. In dynamics, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve. You look not at the individual but the overall behavior.
In the below game in arras.io, green represents the enemy team and blue represents the attacking team. A player might concentrate on the battle in front of them and have a lot of fun. Yet when looking at the overall map, we see that most squares are near impossible to defend save the last green one in the corner. I can predict the result of the game based on the numbers of each side; it’s like a tug-of-war where green cannot win, and it is just a matter of time until most the players in green leave and blue wins.
If you can see the result, what’s the point of playing?
In people, there are at times exceptions. A person who looks like a party dude may not like alcohol because of his parents’ experience with a drunk driver. But for the most part, I wonder if it’s possible to create a finite set of attractors that represent certain personalities and their mode of interaction, beliefs, and behaviors. I see certain paths that high school classmates go down with little surprise.
Even in college, I had a general sense of someone’s competence and where they would end up from only meeting them for a short period of time, but there have been surprises. People who I thought would get somewhere but didn’t. And people I felt were stupid but still seem conventionally successful.
It’s a tough question. Are people individuals or prototypes? People like to think they are individuals, but with how many people there are, there are sure to be repeats. And what’s the point of playing a game if the other party is predictable?
Some conclusions:
I’m sure there are more takeaways than just this.
- If your clan becomes well known, it will attract bad and weak people attracted to prestige
- Coordination costs are significant
- Even if you are the ‘leader’ of a group, it is annoying to lead people who don’t have the same understanding
- Noobs gravitate toward large clans and entrenched players because they need it to feel powerful
- High skilled players don’t make full use of their ability in low-skill (low dimension) environments or entrenched environments. Q: Would ‘making it’ in an entrenched environment make it almost impossible to dislodge a high-skilled player?
- Certain people are independent, others are weak and servile. The latter is hard to destroy if they are entrenched or in a large group. Weakness of independent high-skill players is that they don’t form groups because of how easy it is for them to be skilled alone
- Look at the map and the direction, not at the individual actions