My dissertation proposal is... Digital migrants: from Venezuela to RuneScape

This post is about why a middle-aged Venezuelan lady is killing Zulrah, the snake boss in Old-school RuneScape (OSRS). It's also my dissertation proposal.

(Note that the study has now been completed and the results are reported here).

Understanding what makes people expand or constrict their moral circle is an important area of research in moral psychology (1, 2, 3). What makes people care about others, others who are different to them, or others in faraway lands?

Digital communications can provide evidence for this moral psychological question.

What is a moral circle?

A moral circle is simply the people that you think are worthy of moral treatment.

A picture below gives an example.

Our moral circles expand, say philosophers, because of reason (4). As in, there is no good reason to treat foreigners differently.

True, suggested Adam Smith, if you learn about a terrible earthquake in a faraway land that has killed millions of people - it would distress you for a time (5). You may even do something about it, but your life would probably continue on as normal.

What would distress you more, perhaps, would be some damage to one of your little fingers. That would hurt here and now, and would probably disrupt your life more than the earthquake would.

Imagine now you were given a choice between causing that earthquake or the damage to your little finger. Because of reason, says Smith, you'd almost always choose to take on the minor pain yourself.

Psychologically, however, this is a highly abstract process.

Communication technologies may make this process more concrete, realistic, and psychologically more likely (6).

Indeed, communication technologies across history are associated with a widening moral circle and a steep decline in societal violence, such as: the printing press, transportation, literacy rates, urbanization, increased mobility, access to mass media, and globalization.

Pinker' 800 page book on the above subject is condensed into an hour talk here. It's good.

As people can interact and learn about more people in the world, their stories, perspectives, ways of life, we simply have more opportunity to empathise with others in a more concrete, efficient way (the reverse is also true, more opportunity for hate etc).

These technologies also alter the ability of a person to act in response to learning of suffering abroad and various effective aid organisations combined with the donations given to them evidence this (7).

This Ted Talk illustrates exactly this.

Psychological data in different domains supports the idea that communication positively effects the moral circle.

For example, countries in which women are more influential have less domestic violence (8); people who know gay people are less homophobic (9); and American counties along coasts and waterways are more liberal than rural conservative communities (10).

In laboratory studies, people find it easier to sympathise with others when common values are shared or perspectives are taken (11, 12, 13, 14).

Digital communications may extend this moral process - making it easier for people to interact with and then care about others in far away lands.

Digital communications mirror real world interactions whenever human actors are involved, reflecting human nature (15, 16).

Digital communication – through the online game RuneScape, Twitter, and YouTube – permit direct peer-to-peer interaction in real time that allows an individual sitting behind a computer who lives comfortably to learn about the suffering of another person in a faraway land (17).

Indeed, in digital contexts, people respond similarly to real-world disasters as they would in person (18).

What are the psychological consequences of these facts?

The online game Old-school RuneScape (OSRS) is caught up in a real-world economic crisis happening right now in Venezuela.

Some estimates suggest that 96% of Venezuelans live on less than $1.90 a day - what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty (19, 20). It is, perhaps, the worst economic crisis a country across the world has ever experienced during peace times (21).

Consequently, tens of millions of people across the nation of Venezuela have experienced hyper-inflation, meaning worthless money, food shortages, and millions of refugees.

What is hyperinflation?

Money becomes worthless.

See picture below for the price of a chicken in Venezuela.

Because work in the country cannot generate sufficient income, Venezuelans sought work online: in OSRS.

OSRS contains within it a digital analogue of a market economy where players can trade in the in-game currency, gold (22). People play, get gold, and can sell this gold for real world money – although this is against game rules (23).

For most players it is not worth the risk of their account getting banned or even monetary gain. However, for Venezuelans whose currency has collapsed, playing OSRS for real-world money has become a legitimate strategy for generating income and feeding families (24).

The following videos document this fact.

1-2 are dark but informative comedies

3-5 are interviews from Venezuelan people themselves (I learned about this through video 3, which has also raised more than $14,000 for a humanitarian charity):

The real-world economic implications for RuneScape were noticed in a 2015 gambling study (25).

Today, however, the implications are scaled up to life and death for potentially thousands if not tens of thousands of Venezuelans, although currently the exact numbers are not known (26).

Surely it is a sad fact that an online economy, one that exists in "role playing game" is more stable than one in the real world - where flesh and blood human beings actually live (27). Lessons from Venezuela's disaster ought to be learned (why did the Venezuelan economy collapse while an online economy in RuneScape functions?)

What is known is that the amount activity from Venezuelan players has disrupted prices in the RuneScape economy, provoking a moral response from the community.

The moral response is that: Venezuelans are an out-group of rule-breakers worthy of condemnation, or they are an out-group who are suffering and worthy of our sympathy.

This moral response towards an out-group mirrors the perennial debates about out-groups in the real world and across history: they are unfairly taking jobs, or they are justly finding new work (27).

Such ingroup/outgroup distinctions are robust psychological findings that appear to be built-in functions of human nature and are influenced by how that group is perceived (1, 2).

The digital circumstance of Venezuela and RuneScape offers a unique opportunity for psychological study analogous to - and with direct implications for - the physical world.

OSRS has a sister game called RuneScape 3 (RS3) that is fundamentally distinct and because of this probably attracts a different player base. The demand for RS3 gold is low, so Venezuelans primarily play OSRS.

Assuming that both groups are similar demographically creates a quasi-experimental scenario: two different populations have natural group difference on an independent variable: OSRS players may have interacted with more with Venezuelans than RS3 players in-game and in other digital communications (Twitter/YouTube).

Given these assumptions, are there systematic group differences in moral psychological outlook between OSRS and RS3 players towards Venezuelans? Or in money donated to charitable causes? Or to individual Venezuelans?

See schematic below which illustrates this:

Because of the accessibility of data numerous additional questions can be posed:

• do OSRS players treat Venezuelans as an out or ingroup?
• what can digital communications on Twitter and YouTube reveal about how the RuneScape community reacts to the suffering of an out-group?
• to what extent do digital communications broaden or tighten the moral circle of OSRS players?
• what are the psychological predictors?
• why has the RuneScape community donated over $14,000 USD to charitable causes in Venezuela?
• which community of RuneScape players do such donations come from?

An empirical psychological analysis can begin to parse out group differences, test explanations, and examine predictors about the relationships between digital communication, moral psychology, and real-world behaviour.

It's a terrible thing that people are out there living in extreme poverty or who are killing green dragons in Runescape for a real-world income. There can be no doubt about this (although, history, context, and global trends help).

Nevertheless, I believe that RuneScape has in some form or another helped somewhat to reduce this for some people in Venezuela; that's why it's worth investigating, explaining, and understanding.

Beliefs, however, ought to be tested.

1) Fiske, S. T. (2015). Intergroup biases: a focus on stereotype content. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 3, 45-50. 10.1016/j.cobeha.2015.01.010

2) Everett, J. A. C., Faber, N. S., & Crockett, M. (2015). Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9(15)

3) Graham, J., Waytz, A., Meindl, P., Iyer, R., & Young, L. (2017). Centripetal and centrifugal forces in the moral circle: Competing constraints on moral learning. Cognition 167, 58-65. 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.001

4) Singer, P. (1981). The expanding circle. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5) Smith, A., & Haakonssen, K. (2002). The theory of moral sentiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6) Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature. Viking books: New York.

7) Singer, P. (2009). The life you can save. New York: Random House

8) Archer, J. (2006). Cross-cultural differences in physical aggression between partners: a social-role analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(2)

9) Newport Frank. (2021). Homosexuality. https://news.gallup.com/poll/9916/homosexuality.aspx

10) Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98-116. 10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z

11) Krebs, D. (1975). Empathy and Altruism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(6)

12) Batson, C. D. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(2)

13) Batson, C. D., & Moran, T. (1999). Empathy-induced altruism in a prisoner's dilemma. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29(7)

14) Batson, C. D., & Ahmad, N. (2001). Empathy-induced altruism in a prisoner's dilemma II: what if the target of empathy has defected? European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(1)

15) Chalmers, D. (2022). Reality+: virtual worlds and the problem of philosophy. W. W. Norton & Company.

16) Brazier, C. (2022). Paraphrased from conversation

17) Ryan, J. (2013). A history of the internet and the digital future. Reakiton Books

18) Miller, E. D. (2019). Codifying gradients of evil in select YouTube comment postings. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 1(3), 216-222. 10.1002/hbe2.155

19) Poverty and politics in Venezuela. (2019). The Borgen project. https://borgenproject.org/tag/poverty-in-venezuela/

20) The 17 goals. (2015). United Nations. https://sdgs.un.org/goals

21) Gallegos, R. (2016). Crude nation: how oil riches ruined Venezuela. New York: Potomac Books Inc.

22 Bilir, T. (2009). Real economics in virtual worlds: a massive multiplayer online game case study, RuneScape (master’s thesis). https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/31657

23) Jagex. (2022). Rules of RuneScape. https://www.jagex.com/en-GB/terms/rules-of-runescape

24) Venezuela’s paper currency is worthless, so its people seek virtual gold. (2019, The Economist, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/11/21/venezuelas-paper-currency-is-worthless-so-its-people-seek-virtual-gold

25) Griffiths, M., & King, R. (2015). Are mini-games within RuneScape gambling or gaming. Gaming Law Review and Economics, 19(9)

26) Aronczyk, A., & Beras, E. (2021). Video gaming the system. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121

27) Sowell, T. (2011). Economic facts and fallacies. New York: Basic books.