This is something that I've done a lot of thinking about in the past few months, and reinforced by some of the themes shown in Sword Art Online, particularly the idea that how you act and what you put into a game character reflects upon your RL personality. This is something that I've thought a lot about, particularly after playing DayZ, and this can relate to any game where there are moral choices to be made. I'll start with DayZ, because it's purely player interaction rather than just NPCs.

I'll start my saying that DayZ is a freeform game, and that essentially means you get out of it what you put into it. I'm sure plenty of you have heard me rant and bitch about bandits in DayZ, and this has nothing to do with that, though it has helped me formulate some theories. DayZ being an open world game where you can do anything you want to, game mechanics permitting (with the exception of hacking and exploiting glitches), it kinda shows where your priorities lie when you have fun making the game harder for other players. I'm not just talking about killing on sight, there are worse things that can happen. I'll use my dad as an example; one time he was playing DayZ, and, predictably, he broke his legs on a staircase. So, with no morphine, no splint, over a kilometer away from a town with zombies to eat him to death, and no way as of yet to respawn, he started crawling around looking for something to either kill himself or patch his legs up. Not long afterwards, a player comes along and my dad is practically begging him to kill him. The other player stopped and looked at him, obviously showing that he knew that my dad was having a shitty day, and he fucking says no and runs the other way.

This is one of those situations where you really have to look at the behavior of the person in real life. My dad, having been crawling around for the last half hour, was quite obviously not enjoying himself. When he asks someone to kill him, a relatively easy thing to do, and, theoretically, a way to get out some aggression in game, and they refuse, it shows a very basic lack of respect for the player; it's below a lack of respect, it's just dick behavior because he wants to be a dick. Yeah, it's a game, an open world game where you can do anything you want, but when it comes to something like this, I can only relate it to griefing. This player, by intentionally leaving my dad to continue crawling around with broken legs, showed that he clearly just wanted to be a prick, for no other reason than exactly that.

The same can be applied to spawnkillers, specifically when it relates to people who are playing the game for the first time. Let's say you just got this game, you spawn in, and not even five minutes in, five minutes into a world you know nothing about and are eager to explore and discover, you get sniped. Let's say it happens again next time, and the time after that you run across someone who is armed and you ask them for help, noting that it's your first time playing and you've already been shot twice. They raise their gun and put a bullet in your brain, saying "Welcome to DayZ" in the process. Let's take a moment to look at the killer's motivation. They don't have much of a motivation other than "Hey, a player, let's kill him then taunt him with the typical welcoming phrase." There is no other motivation. They're a fresh spawn, so no gear; they're a brand new player, so hardly a threat; they just asked for help, so any vestige of thought that they are a threat is a fucking joke. At that point there is no reason to kill them other than either just to kill them, or to specifically make their gameplay experience less enjoyable; ie. griefing.

Maybe it's just because I usually play the hero type, but I feel like gamers have a responsibility to one another, no matter what game they're playing, to make it enjoyable to one another, at least those who take a game seriously. That's part of what I feel like the problem is with DayZ is that not many people take it seriously. There are some games that aren't really meant to be taken seriously, like Call of Duty, Battlefield, or really any other FPS, because the point of the game is to kill everyone on the enemy team. But in games that could be taken as RPGs, like DayZ or Minecraft, there is a certain level of sincerity that players need to put into their gameplay to get the full experience, and it's a damn shame when people come into those kinds of games looking to do nothing other than kill other players or turn the game dynamic inside out.

Going back to what I said about Sword Art Online, Kirito made a point of saying that any player's behavior in game is in some way a reflection of who they are. There are cases where this isn't true or doesn't matter, but in most cases I find it to be very valid. Just like an actor is never truly a character, but an actor playing a character, players in a video game put a bit of themselves into that videogame. If you're a nice guy in game, you're probably a nice guy in real life, and vice-versa. The only problem is those who fall into the "dick" category will rationalize it by saying "It's just a game, calm down, fag," or something along those lines.