// PC GAMER — GAMING
I spoke to one of the world's only gaming political scientists and he taught me how to avoid getting murdered in Arc Raiders
"Players want to feel like they're powerful and can do something cool."
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
If you've played an extraction shooter like Arc Raiders or Marathon, you've probably experienced the agony of trusting another player only for them to shoot you in the head and nick all your stuff. Whenever that happens—and it's happened to me more than I'd like to admit—the same questions run through my head (after the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth). Was that always going to happen? Did I do something wrong? Should I have said something different? Behaved differently? Or should I have simply foregone any attempt at diplomacy and shot first?
I've often wondered if there's a way to get better at this. Not just to convince other players that I'm not a threat, but to make them not want to shoot me. Conveniently, I recently had the chance to speak to someone who knows a thing or two about resolving such situations, both in videogames and real life.
James 'Pigeon' Fielder is one of only two political scientists in the world who specialise in gaming. Or at least, if there are more than two, Fielder is yet to be made aware of them: "When I talk about my research with fellow political scientists they either look at me like I'm crazy or they go 'Oh, that sounds cool.'"
Political science is the study of governments, which in turns means it's the study of human behaviour at a large-scale, organised level. Areas of interest include policy development, power distribution, and most importantly for us, conflict resolution.
What relevance does this have to games? Fielder answers this himself: "It's almost like taking theories of political science and doing fruit fly experiments, like trying to understand human behaviour, specifically human political behaviour, inside of game worlds," he says. "In a space like EVE Online, we might see political phenomena develop in weeks, months, or years that in real life would take decades or centuries to express themselves."
How does one become a political scientist specialising in games? Well, it's not exactly a job with an established career path, but Fielder arrived at it through his career in the US military, where his lifelong love of TTRPGs resulted in an aptitude for designing wargames. "I was getting groomed to be promoted from specialist to sergeant, and to be promoted, I had to demonstrate that I could teach a class," he says. "So I decided to build a class on a task that integrated roleplaying game elements. Why it seemed like a good idea at the time, I can't recall. All I know is that everybody had a great time."
Fielder's commanding officers took notice: "Once you get that stink on you in the military, like 'Oh Fielder, can you build another exercise for us?' You build another exercise, and they would get bigger and bigger," he says. "To date, the biggest exercise I've ever designed was for 5,000 people that ran 168 hours."