I swear i see this behavior that’s supposedly an early childhood behavior in children 2-5 all the time online. People in team games who seem unable, incapable, not just of cooperating as a team but als unable to recognize cooperation as helpful or desirable.

Currently it’s my going theory as to why some people breeze through helldivers while others suffer great frustration with the game; team players with mediocre skills and basic game knowledge will succeed, while a group of four individuals who do not cooperate, even if each of htem has better shooting skills, movement, or response times, will fail.

And what’s fascinating is the people who seem unable to see and understand that. I’ve played large scale multiplayer games where the devs radically changed the core game experience because a player faction that leveraged team play and cooperation completely dominated other factions despite having, on average, less skilled players. Teamwork and communication were overwhelming force multipliers that the other factions could not overcome to degree that it was driving players away from the game.

My current jones is figuring out what drives a small but extremely vicious group of angry players in helldivers 2 and i think that ultimately, when analyzed from sufficient difference, the problem is a sub-set of players who cannot play cooperatively, do not realize they cannot play cooperatively, and so they feel bullied and persecuted when they fail in a game that requires teamwork and cooperation. For these players, unaware of their inability to cooperate, these failures can only be explained by malicious design choices by the devs. Since they do not or cannot understand that the game requires them to work with others to succeed the only explanation they can come up with is that the devs are attacking them. When a weapon is bugged in a way that allows an individual to bulldoze the game alone this group flocks to it and believes that they must use the weapon bc, from their perspective, that broken weapon is the only possible way to succeed.

They simply do not, maybe can not, understand that other players can and do succeed. They do not seem to see teamwork and do not understand on a conceptual level what teamwork is or what it accomplishes. They can only view the game from the perspective of themselves as an isolated individual.

And, so, when the devs fix a bug in a weapon that caused it to wildly overperform, these players believe they have been attacked for no reason. They were enjoying the game, then the devs maliciously broke their toy, now they cannot enjoy the devs. The only explanation they can conjure is that the devs are persecuting them out of malice.

For months I’ve been completely fascinated by the disparity by what players in online forums say about the game and what i understand about the game’s mechanics and what I observe in the game. Online people will say, with rigid and inflexible certainty, that it is impossible to complete the game without a specific “meta” loadout. They seem completely convinced of this. And the plain fact is that many players are able to breeze through the most challenging content with little difficulty. And the gap seems unbridgable. No amount of evidence will shift some people. Many of them very vocally reject any attempt at education.

It’s a personal concern to me because I do quite well at the game and play at the highest difficulty. Seeing a vocal minority of players demand that the game be made dramatically less complex and less challenging concerns me because if such changes are made I will not be able to enjoy the game. And the devs seem to be taking this minority very seriously and are describing changes they want to make to the game that will fundamentally change it.

And it won’t work. It’s a contradiction. It’s a four player, team oriented game. If it’s simplified to the point where individuals can succeed alone it will not be satisfying to team players. If it’s made to satisfy team players it will not be suitable for loners. The small dev team cannot bridge this gap by creating essentially two separate games to appease each group. And it seems like they’re going to try.

It’s very unfortunate. Part of how i figured this out was a long, somewhat heated discussion with a pair of software engineers about why some people had so much trouble with the game. They put forth various changes to the mechanics of the game, none of which seemed to me to be relevant or to address the problem. They, in turn, were short with me and began speaking like i was a child who couldn’t understanf simple concepts. And eventually a third party pointed out why we couldn’t agree.

They’re software engineers. To them the problem must lie in the software and the solution is to fiddle with it. I’m an anthropologist. I identified the problem as lying in the cultural beliefs and expectations of some players. The changes they were positing would all fail, not because of anything to do with their solutions, but becuase *the player population would never engage with the solutions". That was the gap. They didn’t understand that no matter how they fiddled with things, they were trying to appease a group of people who are completely disinterested in learning or change, and who will not deviate from their behavior the engage with changes in game systems, in-game attempts at education, or tweaks to the parameters of weapons and enemies. They thought i was an idiot who rejected all their proposals because i couldn’t understand the basics of games design, where I identified the problem as lying not within the game but within a subsection of the culture playing the game.

If that conversation sounds extremely frustrating; that’s what being an anthropologist is like all the time. We study culture, and for most people culture is just as invisible and inexplicable as quantum mechanics. It just doesn’t exist for most people and as such it’s excruciating trying to communicate about culture. Stem people especially believe that they’re rational individuals who exist completely by themselves and are quite hard to reach. Culture is soft and squishy, so it must not be real or important. Telling them that this is a cultural belief they hold does nothing to help the matter.