BY: DUSTIN BATTY

What if you knew that the world was going to end in a week? If death was certain and there was no way to escape it, how would you spend your final days? How would your behaviour change? A recent study suggests that, contrary to popular media, you would probably become more neighbourly.

Although movies like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and This is the End predict a collapse of civilized behaviour in favour of either hedonistic debauchery or violent anarchy, the study found that people would likely act more like Xavier from No Tomorrow: friendly, helpful, and socially positive.

Contrary to popular belief, this study shows that people will remain civil as the world ends.

The researchers came to this conclusion after analysing the behaviour of players in a virtual world’s end scenario as the closed beta test (CBT) of an MMORPG video game came to an end, after which all user data was deleted. Over 80,000 players participated in the fourth CBT for the game ArcheAge, and the researchers were able to analyse over 275,000,000 points of data.

The researchers acknowledge the fact that behaviour exhibited in a video game does not necessarily correspond to what people would do in a real situation, but they say that there is evidence that virtual scenarios mimic reality. For example, virtual economies have been shown to develop similarly to real economic structures. Thus, they argue, there is a good chance that the behaviour they analysed is indicative of what will happen in a real end of world scenario.

ArcheAge is a “massively multiplayer online” video game that provides many different ways for players to interact.

This seems like a reasonable assessment. In fact, the reality may be even more positive than the virtual. In a virtual world, there are often no real-world consequences to anti-social behaviour such as aggressive language and the “murder” of other players. In reality, though, people would still have to worry about guilt, and possibly also moral and spiritual consequences for negative actions. Because of this, I would expect people to be more prone to engage in anti-social behaviour in a virtual world’s end scenario than in a real one.

Though most people displayed pro-social behaviour in their final days, there were a few outlying players whose anti-social activities increased toward the end. However, only 334 players committed “murder” in the final two weeks of the CBT, which is a very small percentage of the total number of players.

Peaceful community building was seen to be much more prevalent than violent anarchy.

The pro-social behaviour that the players displayed was mostly centred on interactions. There was a general increase in the number of messages that players sent to each other, and a general increase in the friendliness of the messages. There was also a tendency for players to enter into new groups in the last couple of days, meeting new people and chatting with them.

Though people stopped creating new items and attempting to level up their characters, they were more likely to help each other out. This means that people started focusing less on their own individual development and more on developing their interpersonal relationships and their community.

If this really is how people will react to the end of the world, then my faith in humanity has been restored. When it comes right down to it, we know how to be good people.