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