The following video contains spoilers for Life Is Strange
Lots and lots of spoilers
You have been warned
Life is all about choice
Coke or pepsi?
Batman or Superman?
Euthanize you best friend or kill her father?
Wait - what?
♪ Game Theory Intro ♪
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory
The show that makes statistical analysis of video game trends cool
Well...cooler
And speaking of statistical analysis, today's episode is brought to you by...you, nearly 25,000 of you in fact
You helped provide the data we're using today, which is incredible
Scientists would kill to have that many volunteers for their studies
So in short, you guys rock!
Oh and uh, science? Eat your heart out
But let's not get ahead of ourselves
If you watch GTLive, you may have seen our 10-part series on Life Is Strange
Which was our most requested game to date
If you're not familiar with the game, heres a link to the archived videos
Enjoy the koala rants! I'll see you in 20 hours
But for those of you who don't want to burn through a day binge-watching my mug on the couch
Life Is Strange is like a choose your own adventure book with an emo haircut
The game follows a girl named Max who is studying photography at a boarding school in Oregon
Beyond that, you have free will to make all sorts of choices about what Max does
From watering the plant in her dorm room to signing petitions
*shots fired airhorn* SUPER COMPELLING GAMEPLAY
But this game is far more than taking Polaroids of things mundane enough to get a filter slapped onto them
and posting it on Instagram as art
The twist here is that Max discovers that she has the ability to rewind time and remedy her mistakes
Which turns out to be super useful since her best friend, Chloe, has a real penchant for getting herself killed
Uhh, whoops, I shot a car bumper for no reason and the bullet ricocheted and hit me in the gut
Oh, no! I was lying on some train tracks and got stuck...Again
Oh, gee! I wonder what happens if I try to track down a serial murderer without contacting the police
Criminy, Chloe! Max is constantly splitting the time-space continum
So that you can spit in the face of natural selection
The least, THE LEAST, you can do is not provoke the gun-toting drug dealer, okay?
Oh! And there she goes getting shot in the bathroom again. Great.
As you go, the choices get harder and more intense to the point that, at the end of the game,
you're making choices that don't really fit into black and white categories of right and wrong anymore
At the end of each chapter, the game rewards you with the chance to compare your decisions
To those made by other players
From "did you steal the money for handicapped children"
To "did you prevent your sexually assaulted best friend from jumping off of a building"
As an aside, can I just say how emotionally ill prepared I was
to have my video game friend depend on me to talk her down from suicide?
That's some really, really serious stuff
Like Tumblr trigger word level serious
Makes me miss the days when the most intense thing that happened in a game was hitting someone with a
red shell right before they crossed the finish line
But of all the decisions in the game, it was the final one that really caught my attention
After 19 hours spent reuniting with your best friend, Chloe, bonding over late-night pool parties,
early morning dance-offs, shared kisses, and heart-to-heart conversations,
You have to decide whether you want to sacrifice her life
At this point, you've saved her life no less than 5 times
And honestly many, many more if you really sucked at stopping that train
But all of Max's Back to the Future-ing hasn't sat well with the rest of the univers
A giant tornado is set to destroy the entire town
And Chloe determines that the only way to save it is for Max to go back in time to let her die the first time she gets shot
Thereby setting the timeline on the right path
And that's your last choice of the game: sacrifice your best friend to save a whole town,
Or let the town and all the people in it get sucked into a vortex to let your best friend live
The End
So much for a happy ending
A more accurate title for this game would have been "Life Is Emotionally Taxing"
Needless to say, in our playthrough I may have gotten a little choked up
*gunshot*
But they were the most manly of tears
Jason was cutting onions! What can I say?
Now according to the end-game statistics covering all the people who played Life Is Strange
53% of people chose to sacrifice Chloe and 47% chose to sacrifice the town
It's just barely above a coin flip
But I was curious
Was there something about a gamer's personality type that would help decide
what they would choose in the final moments of sacrifice?
And going a level deeper, were you guys, the Theorist Family, more likely to skew one way or the other?
So I ran a test, and the answer was a resounding yes
It turns out Theorists might have a lot more in common than just going bananas over FNAF
Across the 25,000 responses you sent in, more than 72% of you said that you would sacrifice Chloe to save the town
That's a huge difference from the 50/50 split you see in the game
And so the obvious follow-up question is why are we seeing this?
Why are our results so much different than the rest of the gaming community?
So I dug deeper into the data
The trend held across gender, as well
Females who took the survey opted to sacrifice Chloe al little over 75% of the time
While men did so 71% of the time
And then what about age or nationality?
Well, though we've been unable to pull many people in their 50s and 60s from the crack-like high of FarmVille
The channel's viewers are from a diverse age range and heritage
So that didn't seem to be a huge factor here either
So then, what is it?
Why would a Theorist be so eager to ax their best friend
while the general gaming populace is so split on the decision?
And that's where the last question of the survey came into play
While there aren't tons philosophers pondering the implications of gamer choice in Life Is Strange
This kind of question has been around for a long time in the study of ethics
In 1967, British philosopher Phillippa Foot posed a thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem
It goes like this:
A trolley is running down a track toward 5 workers
And the workers can't get out of the way fast enough
However, there's a switch that would send the trolley down an alternate track where it would hit only one worker
In this situation, do you pull the switch?
Would you? Would you do it?
'Cause in studies, about 90% of regular people say that they would
This decision is classified under the ethical philosophy of act utilitarianism
In which the right action to take is the one that maximizes the well-being for all people
It's basically a math problem
If someone has to die, it's more valuable to save 5 people than to save one
And honestly, that's likely what leads many of us to sacrifice Chloe and save Arcadia Bay
We hold the value of hundreds of lives in higher regard than we hold a single life
It's like Will You Press the Button all over again
But, obviously, that's not the whole story
In the trolley problem, there's no distinction between the two groups of workers
beyond how many of them there are
But Life Is Strange adds the wrinkle that the one person we'd have to kill is our best friend
And that makes a huge difference
In another variation of the trolley problem, the train is still going down the track toward the 5 people
But it can be stopped if you push an overweight person standing next to you onto the track
I kid you not, this is an legitimate ethical question philosophers debate
Clearly they have too much time on there hands
"Now in this scenario it's a fat person"
"In this scenario it's 20 puppies"
"And in this scenario it's an oversized Fig Newton"
Slow clap, philosophy, slow clap
Anyway, the utilitarian math of this new version is exactly the same as before
One person sacrificed to save five
But people respond to this version of events very differently
In fact, the majority of people say they wouldn't shove the man onto the tracks
In other words, that one change of having them push the person onto the track
changed answers from 90% stopping the train to less than 50%
And if you think about it, the same holds true in Life Is Strange
Where you, as the player, have to physically choose to rewind time, as Max
To set the course of events back to what they originally were
But why does this cause such a huge change?
Well a researcher named Joshua Greene used FMRI readings to measure the brain activity
In subjects presented with both problems
Whereas the FMRI showed a lot more activity in the rational parts of the brain when you can just pull the switch
Killing in a less personal fashion
In the second scenario with you physically doing the pushing onto the tracks
It's the Limbic system that lights up
The part of the brain that revolves around emotional response
Since you're in a situation where you physically have to do the killing yourself
This response is known as rule utilitarianism
The idea that following an established set of ethical rules, regardless of the situation, is the right solution
In this case, the ethical rule is don't push people in front of moving trains
Very good advice I find
Not from past experience, or anything
Going back to Life Is Strange, the people who argue for saving Chloe are more likely to be rule utilitarians
They're most likely operating under the concept
that a person should do anything possible to avoid harming their loved ones
Okay, so that's all pretty logical, but then why would Theorists be so much more likely to sacrifice Chloe?
It turns out that we Theorists are not like the population at large
Of course everyone knew that about me the first time I wore a lime green suit in public
But it's nice to have your company out there on the fringe
As the final question of the survey, I asked people to quickly take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment
Which classifies you into one of 16 different personality categories based on a 4-letter code
This thing is an incredibly accurate test that, if you've never taken it before, you absolutely should
I'm including a link in the description for you. It takes like 10 minutes, tops
People around the world swear by this thing
Including a lot of top companies who get their employees take it so they better understand their working style
It's very cool
Anyway, the categories break you down as follows:
Number 1: Are you quiet and introverted or an extroverted people person
Number 2: Do you prefer using your senses to get hands on experience with a situation
Or do you prefer looking for patterns in the data through intuition
Number 3: Do you make decisions by thinking about the situation or feeling what the right thing to do is
And finally, do you prefer planning and order in your life, classified as judging
Or would you rather keep yourself fluid and flexible, classified as perceiving
Take one from each of those pairs of letters and you have yourself your Myers-Briggs personality type
And here's where the Theorist data gets really interesting
When you look at global data, the 1st, 3rd, and 4th letters all tend to have a 50/50 split
For instance, on the whole 50% of people are introverts, staying at home and playing a video game
While the other 50% are extroverts, going to parties and... doing things that people do at parties
I can only assume playing rocus games of competitive chess
But it's that 2nd letter, sensing vs. intuiting, where there's a huge, huge split
70% of the world's population are sensors
They prefer reality, the information that's right there in front of them, in their face
The other 30% are intuiters
People who look at examples of past behavior and discover patterns out of that data
They don't like thinking about the past, so much as they like speculating towards the future
And yet, when I looked at the Theorist data, your numbers, it was reversed
77% of you were intuitive and 23% were sensing
The exact opposite of what the global population is
And while that may seem crazy, it makes a ton of sense
Look at the show you're choosing to watch
Sensors are the people most likely to get mad at me for making this show
For applying science and math and logic to video games because the concrete fact is, they're just video games
Sensors are the people who are going to see Mario as a hero because his games SAY he's a hero
He rescues the princess
It's concrete evidence right there in front of your face. It's real
But intuiters aren't afraid to speculate
They see past instances of Mario's bad behavior and draw a pattern: Mario is mental
Even though he may not be and even though a lot of the hard evidence might say otherwise,
We intuiters get joy out of just speculating about that sort of thing
It's funny actually
When I take this test, I tend to split introvert and extrovert, as well as thinking vs. thinking
It's weird, I'm splitting like 4 different personality types
But I am heavy into the other two categories, and especially into the N category
It even goes beyond the show
When I'm not writing scripts, I'm looking at data to help out other YouTubers
Trying to find patterns in their traffic sources and predict the future of where things are going
But now look at our results with Life Is Strange
People who are more N than S are likely to derive meaning from patterns they've seen before
And are more likely to consider the future when making decisions
And you're when making the decision about whether to save or sacrifice Chloe
Those two factors are going to push you in a certain direction: sacrificing Chloe
The player, like Max, has seen the pattern that Chloe is basically a Final Destination victim
She's been destined to die the whole game from Nathan shooting her, to Frank shooting her
To Chloe shooting...herself
Then there's the train and Mr. Jefferson
People under the intuitive spectrum are going to give a lot more weight to that pattern
Than those who are in the sensing spectrum, who are going to be much more interested in the past
And your emotional history and long friendship with her
The decision to sacrifice Chloe is also all about the future
Obviously, Max has a richer past with Chloe than she does with any other person in Arcadia Bay
But those who lean more intuitive find a way to look past that and consider the possible outcomes for lots of people
Not just themselves and the people that they're close to
Isn't that cool? And it doesn't stop there
What else makes Theorists different?
The most frequent 4-letter combination to show up was INFP, introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving
In fact, this personality type, nicknamed the Mediator, was more than 4 times as popular as the average personality type
According to the description for mediators
INFPs quote "combine their intuitive nature with their open-mindedness to allow them to see things from unconventional perspectives"
And are quote "able to connect far-flung dots into a single theme." Sound familiar?
Together, we've spent the last 5 years connecting disparate dots
Trying to bring new perspectives to games
By seeing if we can prove that Link is dead or Sonic is slow
Peach is a mania or Minecraft creepers are explosive moss monsters
It should come as no surprise that Theorists are the same way
In the list of of fictional INFPs, one of the most famous is Fox Mulder from the show The X Files
You know, the guy who says "the truth is out there"
You're not going to find a much better Theorist prototype than that guy
I mean I don't want to get too kumbaya with this
But what's brought so many of us together on this channel, isn't just that we love video games
It's that we approach the world with the same creativity, the same desire to find meaning in unlikely places
So even when we're faced with an impossible choice
The life of our best friend vs the lives of of innocent strangers
We consider the same angles and, by a pretty solid margin, make the same decisions
And that, when you think about it, is pretty darn cool
That by the power and magic of the internet, we were all able to find each other
United by the way that we think without even realizing it
And now, we're 6 million strong
It's pretty awesome
But hey! That's just a theory
A Game Theory!
Thanks for watching :)
And before you go, click the link in the description or this new annotation that works on both desktop and mobile
To check out my collaboration with Sam and Nico from Corridor Digital
If you're not familiar with their channel, these are guys I've wanted to do something with forever
These two guys are some of the best video game inspired virtual effects artists on YouTube
So I'm super excited about this video. I think you're going to dig it
It's a video that was done in partnership with the game Battleborn, which if you've never heard of it
Is like if Borderlands and Team Fortress 2 had a hyperactive baby
Where you can play as everything from a vampire to a penguin in a mech suit
And the coolest news of all is that the game is out right now, today
It's almost like we planned it that way... huh
If you can't tell already it has the awesome sense of humor that games like Tales from the Borderlands has
Something that Corridor Digital is mimicking in their video
"Y-you are, you're pretty hot right now"
"I mean I don't need a thermal camera to be able to tell that one though! Ohhh!"
Anyway, please click over and check it out
It'll be 3 minutes of your life well spent and, honestly, I want them to like me ant think I'm cool
So I want to win their friendship through clicks
So by clicking over, not only are you seeing a very cool video
But you're helping me get more friends
Friendship is nice
Even if you have to bribe them to do so
See you next week!