Woo in video games

Big Les

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I've been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption, the latest big sandbox video game, this time with an old west theme to it. It has a very immersive, slightly spooky feel to it, and I think it's causing gamers to display superstitious behaviour in a way that more primitive games haven't. Have a look at this forum thread, devoted to supposed sightings of ghosts, werewolves, and other weird phenomena that, so far, no one has been able to prove actually exist in the game.

http://www.reddead.net/forums/thread-x-files-red-dead-redemption?page=59

Now, clearly, the big difference with games over real life is that it's eminently possible that a developer could put something para'normal' in a game either as part of the story, or simply as an 'easter egg'. But the developers of this game pride themselves on a realistic experience, and have no history at all of including woo as a subject matter. There is a single thread within this game that could be regarded as paranormal, but equally could be explained otherwise, and is part of the story rather than being something that you could find just existing in the virtual world of the game, which is what the above thread is mainly about.

Just as in real life, the various claims made all have rational explanations - graphical glitches being the most obvious. As graphics improve, pareidolia and other self-deceptive phenomena will no doubt come into play as well. The typical gaming environment - on one's own, in the dark, late at night, may also factor in.

I present this just for interest, really, but if anyone else has come across 'virtual woo' before, it would be interesting to hear about it.
 
Eh, I'm not sure you need to ascribe that to the game.

As a counter-example:

Star Trek Online for example became a soapbox for just about every conspiracy theory out there, soon after launch. Apparently just the fact that it wasn't split into distinct server and everyone on the Sol station or Sirius block could hear anyone else on Sol station or respectively Sirius block, was apparently taken by some as an invitation to sit there for hours on end spewing the most retarded nonsense imaginable. Just because it meant having a lot of audience.

I don't think there's anything in STO or the Star Trek setting that actually promotes belief in the birther conspiracy, or for that matter even has anything to do with Obama or the early 21'st century at all. Frankly everything before Cochrane's first warp flight is practically non-existent in Star Treck. But it has more CT spam than any other game.

Edit: In RDR's case, I doubt that the game promotes woo more than any other game does. If games could convince people that ghosts or werewolves exist, other games make a far better case for it.

ETA:That said, it looks like most aren't even remotely what I'd call woo. Glitches which only happen in rare circumstances, or happen differently for different actions or on different computers, aren't all that unusual. And RDR does have a reputation for being launched very buggy and doing such screwups as applying the wrong texture on the wrong creature. Seeing a werewolf, as in either a human creature with a wolf texture applied or viceversa, or using the animations from the other one, is actually reported by more than one person.
 
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Actually, Rockstar's earlier GTA: San Andreas had many people claiming they'd spotted UFOs. So maybe not that new a phenomenon.
 
Big Les said:
I've been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption, the latest big sandbox video game, this time with an old west theme to it. It has a very immersive, slightly spooky feel to it, and I think it's causing gamers to display superstitious behaviour in a way that more primitive games haven't. Have a look at this forum thread, devoted to supposed sightings of ghosts, werewolves, and other weird phenomena that, so far, no one has been able to prove actually exist in the game.

http://www.reddead.net/forums/thread-x-files-red-dead-redemption?page=59

Now, clearly, the big difference with games over real life is that it's eminently possible that a developer could put something para'normal' in a game either as part of the story, or simply as an 'easter egg'. But the developers of this game pride themselves on a realistic experience, and have no history at all of including woo as a subject matter. There is a single thread within this game that could be regarded as paranormal, but equally could be explained otherwise, and is part of the story rather than being something that you could find just existing in the virtual world of the game, which is what the above thread is mainly about.

Just as in real life, the various claims made all have rational explanations - graphical glitches being the most obvious. As graphics improve, pareidolia and other self-deceptive phenomena will no doubt come into play as well. The typical gaming environment - on one's own, in the dark, late at night, may also factor in.

I present this just for interest, really, but if anyone else has come across 'virtual woo' before, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Click to expand...

There's actually a side mission involving a dowsing rod (East of Armadillo, in the camp on the tall cliff with the large mainroad down.) though your character dismisses it pretty fast but out of his good nature agrees to help the guy aquire the land for a tidy profit.
In addition zombie DLC is on the way.
Many supernatural happenings as well most notably The Funny Man sidequests though I'm not spoiling it.
 
I'm not suggesting games promote woo, if anything it struck me that despite the largely real-world setting, people were still indulging in paranormal delusion.

I did say there were hints of paranormality to the story - this and the overall tone of the game probably encourage the tendency to look for anomalies and assume deliberate agency.
 
Something people have to remember is that what they are seeing on the screen isn't real in any kind of sense at all. There literally is no spoon.

For example what's rendered on the screen by the graphics engine is not necessarily the same as the physics model for the world. It's all just a bunch of mathematical models that come together in different ways and most of them are fairly simple.

All of the "woo" that I've heard about is mostly either content that wasn't properly removed when it had been cut or just plain bugs. Bugs are incredibly common, especially in something of the complexity of red dead (which is probably close to the high water mark for complexity right now in gaming).
 
WWII online generated many reports of strange "things" appearing on the battlefield until some of the devs 'fessed up and admitted it was them "looking in on things"....

The old Combat Flight Simulator (the first one) had a well-known Easter Egg, a flying pig tethered to a stationary point near Stonehenge.
 
Big Les said:
I'm not suggesting games promote woo, if anything it struck me that despite the largely real-world setting, people were still indulging in paranormal delusion.
Click to expand...

But that's the whole question, innit? Is it delusion or is it bugs? Just because someone went for a real-world setting doesn't automatically mean they wrote perfect code.
 
Oh yeah!

I remember San Andreas Bigfoot threads on gaming forums. They were strikingly similar to real life Bigfoot threads. Some would post a blurry offscreen picture as evidence and became agitated as some people didn't believe them. Then the PC version came out and forging evidence became too easy.

Quite a few glitches happened in my play-through of RDR, some were pretty freaky, but none as funny as those posted on youtube. Seems like the engine sometimes loads the wrong model for an instance. Look up donkey women and flying people.
I reckon the Cougar Man bug is nightmarish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVVXyKP1FVk

I also encountered a bug that behaved a bit like a "japanese ghost". And in the second-to-last cutscene nonetheless.
The character model of wounded Jack Marston (from the bear mission) appeared in the barn while the cutscene was playing. It was standing there in a weird position, lurking on the edge of the frames. Pretty unsettling to say the least. Kinda ruined the ending for me.


Stumbling on a random bug is not as glamorous as finding a very rare secret in the game. That might explain why some people will defend their interpretation of events as being part of a conspiracy from the creators instead of the unwanted artifact it really is.

Just like Chemtrails, and 9-11 CD, woo proponents will quote precedents (but games do have Easter eggs), make uneducated interpretations of phenomena they don't fully understand (most players don't really know how a video game engine works and can't always recognize a bug for what it is when they see one.), and appeal to conspiracy (The devs are covering up the whole thing as a bug but they're lying).

Funny thing is, it's every bit as impossible to prove a negative in a virtual reality than it is in real life.
 
Well, some may do it tongue in cheek. It's hard enough to tell sarcasm from the real thing without smileys at times (see for example Poe's law), and some people just are a lot worse at sarcasm or irony or humour than they think.

To use an example from another game, I remember someone's saga of his adventures in Oblivion. He mentioned something like killing a wolf in Kvatch, then leaving the town, and discovering when he returned that in his absence some deranged locals had stuffed the wolf and placed it standing in the middle of the road to town. I'm pretty sure that it was just a humorous description of the Oblivion behaviour of not saving the exact limb position for corpses, and just letting them fall anew each time you reloaded and re-entered a zone. So corpses could have a different pose each time, as if some deranged local keeps repositioning corpses, and for quadrupeds that did sometimes mean a standing position. But at any rate, it was pretty obviously just taking the piss, as opposed to genuinely believing that someone had actually scripted that kind of an AI behaviour.

And some may just want to avoid coming across as negative or as saying "this game has more bugs than an anthill". Either from some sense of duty to protect the devs' feelings, or just not wanting to risk the wrath of the rabid fanboy posse. Some people can take the slightest slight to the perfection of what their idol created as a mortal insult and a declaration of war.

True story: I actually got told on a forum to pack my computer and tell the shop to take it back because I'm too stupid to own one. All because I dared even suggest to the "it's all the users' fault" fanboy posse that a fragmented hard drive doesn't cause race condition bugs to appear in a program that didn't have one, nor does defragmenting the drive cause it to disappear. But apparently that came across to one particular fanboy as not only insulting his idol, but also as a challenge to his knowing all about computers because he worked first level support. If his script said "defragment and reboot", by golly, that _is_ the ultimate cure for all computer problems, and anyone doubting it is one of those idiot users too stupid to own a computer.

On the other hand, I figure I might have gotten away easier if I had merely suggested that it's a secret feature that the game randomly crashes to the desktop :p
 
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I play Red Dead: Redemption, I'm tempted to hang around the town to see if there are any ghosts haunting the place. Would be a cool Easter egg if there are ghosts doing their haunting thing.
 
I've personally found a lot of crap in some of the more recent video games that have been released. These zombie features just seem so stupid, and they're on so many games these days! :rolleyes: A good example can be found in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

By the way, the UFO in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is real and you can find it easily on YouTube. It's quite amusing, check it out if you want. :)
 
The Half Life games are based on the idea i what if every crackpot theory about Secret Government Projects, MIBs,and UFO's is true.
And I Love these games.
 
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