Addressing Social Dilemmas and Fostering Cooperation Through Computer Games

This paper examines how the concept of social dilemmas, situations where individual self-interest conflicts with collective benefit, can be addressed through computer games, with particular attention to identity formation and cooperation. The author presents two strands of work: a previous experimental study using a custom single-player module built for Neverwinter Nights, and an ongoing ethnographic action research project within a World of Warcraft guild that the author leads. The central thesis is that cooperation is best fostered by increasing trust and by making individuals explicitly aware of their choices, and that in-game communities must develop their own norms rather than have them imposed from outside.

The earlier study, involving three researchers and surveys administered before and after gameplay, found that players tried alternative strategies within the game but that this experimentation did not measurably change their real-life choices in a hypothetical social dilemma. Gameplay did, however, prompt deeper reflection on real-world situations. The authors attributed the null result to the game's limited depth and to the absence of interaction with other real people, and identified two key lessons: identity is more complex than anticipated, shaped by individual differences, and the online-offline distinction is not useful for this analysis.

The current research is a qualitative, participant-observer study of a single guild on one role-play server, drawing on chat transcripts, screenshots, and forum discussions, with the author intervening collaboratively in guild affairs. The findings are necessarily limited to this one community and server, as the author acknowledges, and the work emphasizes administrative burdens, the tension between cultivating cooperation and preserving enjoyment, and the difficulty of socializing newcomers into implicit norms such as the convention around looting "ninja" behavior. The author concludes that some members will never fully fit in and that effective social learning in such communities happens through observation rather than direct instruction.