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  • 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!

The following video contains spoilers for Life Is Strange

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