by Mike O’Brien
Like many other video gamers (nearly eight million, in fact), I have spent no small portion of recent weeks in the robot-infested, post-diluvian wastes of late-22nd-Century Italy, looting remnants of a collapsed civilization while hoping that a fellow gamer won’t sneak up and murder me for the scraps in my pockets. This has been much more fun than the preceding description might lead you to believe, if you are not a fan of such grim fantasy playgrounds. It has also, interestingly, afforded rather heart-warming displays of the better side of human nature, despite the occasional predatory ambush or perfidious betrayal. It helps somewhat that nobody really dies in this game; they just get “downed” and then “knocked out” if not revived in time, leaving behind whatever gear they were carrying (except for what they were able to hide in their “safe pocket”, the technical and anatomical details of which are left to the player’s imagination).
This is the world of Arc Raiders, a game that has been in development and re-development for about five years, finally releasing at the end of October after a few public testing sessions elicited an outburst of anticipation from professional and recreational gamers alike. Developed by Sweden’s Embark Studios, it was created by veterans of the Battlefield series of military shooters, who left Battlefield developer DICE when it was clear that the company was losing the plot to its own franchise. Battlefield 4, released in 2013, is still my favourite game of the series and of the genre (that genre being large-scale military shooters pitting one team against another in a combined arms conflict, with soldiers, planes, tanks, boats and other bits of kit fighting for control of various points across a sprawling map).
Arc Raiders is a very different game from Battlefield. Players are not assigned to opposing teams in a binary struggle for victory. There are no flags to capture or defend. It is a wide-open experience with little in the way of explicit instructions or rules. It was originally conceived as a player-vs-enemy (PvE) cooperative multiplayer game, where human players joined together to fight the robots that have taken over Earth’s surface. In this original conception, it bears much similarity to another favourite game of mine, Generation Zero. (Incidentally, Arc Raiders, Battlefield and Generation Zero were all created by Swedish studios. Something in the water, perhaps.) In Generation Zero, players travel across an abandoned Swedish countryside that was overtaken by robots after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like Arc Raiders, it is vast and beautiful, and populated by a variety of terrifying robots. Like Arc Raiders, it allows players to play solo or in a small squad. But unlike Arc Raiders, Generation Zero remained a purely PvE game, with human players only able to interact cooperatively (although devious or careless players could provoke the robots into attacking their fellow survivors). I got an immense amount of enjoyment from Generation Zero because, in addition to being a very good game, it is immense. The playable area of map is about sixty square kilometres in size, covered in towns, industrial spaces and military installations to explore, with procedurally generated robot bases and impromptu battles between roaming factions of NATO and USSR robots (this would make Generation Zero a PvEvE game, I suppose).
Despite this vast canvas, I eventually (after years of enjoyment) ran out of interesting things to do. Everything became a solved problem, and fighting the robots became busywork with a known end result. The developers of Arc Raiders faced a similar problem in testing the early version of their game: the PvE experience lacked a certain excitement, an energizing tension that could be expected to keep drawing players back. So, they re-conceived the project as a PvPvE game, allowing players to attack each other in addition to the common robot enemy. Observers who were looking forward to the earlier concept of the game had mixed feelings, as many gamers avoid PvP games precisely because they do not enjoy the tension of having to fight, or at least worry about fighting, other human players. It is particularly an issue for players who, for whatever reason, cannot play PvP games skilfully enough to avoid being trounced by other human players, making for a rather miserable experience. In single-player games, these gamers could adjust the difficulty of AI enemies to a more enjoyable level of challenge, or in purely cooperative multiplayer games they could benefit from (without being victims of) the higher skill of their fellows.
The developers also changed other aspects of the game’s design, shifting it to an “extraction looter-shooter” where players search for loot in dangerous locations while fighting robots and (sometimes) fellow players, and try to escape safely to the underground city of Speranza before the timer runs out and THE BIG THING happens, wiping out everyone who remains on “Topside”. THE BIG THING that forces players to abide by certain space or time restrictions is a common feature of extraction shooters and last-one-standing “battle royale” (BR) games. In the former case, a time limit forces players to choose a particular set of objectives and locations, and to leave before completing everything that they might have wanted to do. This makes the map seem larger (because it cannot be fully explored in a round) and leaves “unfinished business” for the player to come back to. In the latter case, an advancing wall of deadly something-or-other corrals players into an ever-shrinking subsection of the map, forcing the dwindling population of survivors to leave more easily defended positions and duke it out for the final victory. (Arc Raiders also corrals players spatially, by shutting down extraction points across the map until only one remains, although they can choose to leave while more options are open). Since battle royale games require all but the last player or squad of players to be defeated in order for the match to end, such corralling is necessary to prevent matches from stretching on interminably as cautious players bunker down, miles apart from each other. You can reach the top ten in a battle royale game (like the genre-defining Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds, or “PUBG”) by hiding in a well-located closet for the whole match, but such cautious players will never seize the coveted “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner”. These artificial limits not only help the games’ creators by adding longevity to their game assets and tractability to their games’ winning conditions, but also add visceral tension to games that would otherwise be merely fun, by forcing players out of their comfort zones.
Engineered tension is fine and all, but a game needs stakes to be really engrossing. The economic psychology at play in Arc Raiders creates stakes rather well. The loot one finds in the game has its uses, but ultimately it’s all just pixels and database values. Except that it’s your loot, made yours by the time, mental labour and risk tolerance that you invested to acquire it (or by the moral standing you sacrificed to shoot some poor player in the back for it). The tension and loss aversion that pervades the game makes everything that happens salient on a fundamental cognitive level, and even when players are reflectively aware of the artificial and manipulative nature of these systems, they still create the desired effect.
None of this is unique or especially notable among well-created games. What has made Arc Raiders interesting as a social phenomenon is the developers’ laissez-faire approach to inter-player behaviour. When playing solo, every other player is a potential friend or foe. But there are no explicit incentives one way or another, besides the naturally expected consequences of cooperating or instigating a fight. Players in Battlefield games don’t make a meaningful choice to cooperate with their team mates, nor to fight the opposing team. That’s just how that game works, and to do otherwise doesn’t make any sense. But in the free-for-all on Topside, the choices made by players are meaningful because they are freely chosen. The game gives players communicative tools to navigate these open inter-player possibilities, with voice chat allowing players to speak (or blast music, or chew loudly) to nearby players, and even has the option of disguising one’s voice, ostensibly to help players who feel uncomfortable using their real voice with online strangers (female-sounding players can attract the worst elements of the gaming world, unfortunately). For players who don’t use a microphone, the game provides a pop-up wheel of useful character-voiced speech options, like “Yes”, “No”, “Team Up?” and, very helpfully, “Don’t Shoot!”. They can even opt to dance in place, showing other players that they are joyful beings who deserve to see another tomorrow.
Three of the standard communication options (besides dancing) do not provide information or address requests to other players. They are “Thank You”, “Sorry”, and “Hello” (while all of these add some friendliness and civility to the game, “Hello” also provides a subtle way of saying “I see you there and you’d better not get any ideas”, even when you cannot, in fact, see them there). “Thank you” and “Sorry” gives even voiceless players the ability to express gratitude for the behaviour of others, or remorse for one’s own mistakes, adding a layer of feedback that shapes future behaviour. Maybe it’s the Canadian in me, but I always think warmly of game developers who give their players the ability to apologize.
To the surprise of worried and jaded observers, most solo encounters in the game proceed as follows:
Player A: “Don’t Shoot!”
Player B: “Don’t Shoot!”
Player A: “Okay!”
Player B: “Thanks!”
And both players continue on their merry way. The exceptions (in my play experience, and in the curated experience posted by my preferred gaming YouTubers, who admittedly skew to the friendly side) tend to deviate more towards positivity. For instance, I came across a group of solo players standing around outside (which is a risky proposition by itself), chatting on mic and hopping around in pro-social glee, when a higher-level player came by and asked if anyone needed anything, proceeding to drop weapons, ammunition and healing items on the ground before wishing everyone a farewell and running off. While this is all virtual and arguably meaningless, it is nevertheless an instance of strangers encountering each other in a virtual world where they can wreak violent havoc without consequence, and choosing to use that encounter to be give gifts and assistance. People have won peace prizes for less. Many pixels and YouTube minutes have been spilled on the such behaviour since the game’s release, expressing everything from a wary concern about the inevitable demise of this “age of innocence” to a renewal of faith in humanity.
Most of this goes out the window in the “trios” mode, where players deploy in groups of three and use more robust in-squad information-sharing and command tools to make their way through the map together. The uneasy but usually peaceful conventions that hold in most solo encounters is largely replaced by a shoot-on-sight protocol, despite the game not incentivizing PvP combat any more than in the solo mode. I have no doubt that many theses will be written about the reasons for this (I expect Blackwell-Wiley to issue a call for abstracts for “Arc Raiders and Philosophy” in the first quarter of 2026). My own guess is that it is primarily a matter of prudence, since the first attack of a coordinated three-person ambush is less survivable than a single person’s attack, even without a numerical advantage. Better to initiate a chaotic shoot-out on sight than to wait for one at your attacker’s chosen time. Also, the added communication and coordination tools afforded to players within a trio create a disparity between in-group and out-group interactions, and given the role of communication and cooperation in building trust, it seems natural that trios will be wary of other trios. But the drastic increase of PvP aggression in trio matches seems to call for explanations beyond differences in game mechanics. I think it’s likely that the pack mentality of trios makes players less accountable to themselves as moral agents, and less considerate of the players in other trios as moral patients. Morality in a video game? While the setting is virtual, the brains making the decisions are real, with all the usual chemistry and conditioning. So, at the very least, empathy should have some impact on players’ behaviour, and in most people empathy will engage something like the tug of morality. Providing means of communication, however rudimentary (or, for mic users, as complex as any instance of spoken language) gives empathy a foot in the door.
The trios mode provides a place for more aggressive players to test themselves against others seeking a spicier experience, and this takes some of the PvP heat out of the solo mode. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the wicked players who want to prey on other players without facing the heightened risk of trio servers. They ambush players who are seconds away from safely extracting, or feign pacifism with “Don’t Shoot!” requests, only to shoot other players in the back. Maybe they just want the loot. Maybe they just like annoying people. Maybe their mothers didn’t hold them. Whatever the explanation, the problem lies beyond the scope of normal game design. It is the problem of evil and freedom all over again, and if it were tractable the real world would be a better place (millennia of Western moral philosophy haven’t solved it, so I doubt that a video game studio will crack the code within a single product’s life cycle, although the prospect is too tantalizingly absurd to ignore. Maybe this should be the basis of Mike Schur’s next sitcom). To prevent the evil, you would have to remove the freedom. Which is exactly what some players ask for when they bemoan the switch from PvE to PvPvE; they want to remove all players’ ability to harm each other, because the security from others’ harm is more valuable to them than the freedom gain by harming others.
This is also the basis of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy (I knew that my dusty M.A. Phil. would come in handy some day). Solo servers especially are in a Hobbesian state of nature (the “war of all against all”), and life there is nasty, brutish, solitary and short (but recall that nobody actually dies in Arc Raiders)). The state of nature is not characterized by the actuality of constant predation and violence, but rather by the constant fear of predation and violence. This fear is not only unpleasant in itself, but makes everyone (except, perhaps, the worst of us) worse off by discouraging people from investing in material and social development, knowing that it could be stolen or destroyed at any moment. In Arc Raiders and other extraction shooters, this manifests as “gear fear”, where players leave their best items in safe storage and instead deploy with cheap, easily replaceable gear. This prevents players from flourishing and living their best virtual lives. They could be revelling in glorious battle with titanic robots, or competing with the best players to unlock new secret locations, experiences that transcend the enjoyment of quotidian looting and squabbling. But instead, they hoard what little treasure they have, perhaps partly because the injustice of losing it to some dirty rat hiding by the exit is even more unpalatable than the loss itself.
The Hobbesian solution to players who feel inadequately protected by the sovereign ruler of Arc Raiders (that would be Embark Studios) would be to defect and go play something else. A less drastic solution would be to diminish their psychological attachment to make-believe objects, so that they can enjoy the experiences that they paid for. The developers of the game actually make this easy (for rational people), by creating an economy of abundance within the game. This abundance not only allows players to recover from losses and continue progressing through the game, but also creates an unmanageable surplus of riches for successful players. Players have a limited amount of space at their home base to store their spoils, and eventually have leave even top-level loot behind. This results in another emergent pro-social behaviour; higher-level players will give loot to random lower-level players rather than dump it on the ground, because it has no realizable in-game value to them, but gift-giving has a positive psychological value to the human player behind the avatar, especially when the game affords any recipient of these gifts to express their gratitude. This is a model illustration of the benefits of limitarianism, i.e. placing an upper bound on the amount of wealth people can accumulate, so as to avoid the perverse effects of excessive wealth accumulation and infinite wealth pursuit. Wealthy people can do other things, hopefully better things, with their time and effort when “enough” is a defined value. Hobbes can be read as a limitarian, in that he warned against letting any private person or faction gain enough power to rival the sovereign’s authority and threaten the peace of the commonwealth. (Note that, with credit and debt, both the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor can approach infinity.)
Arc Raiders doesn’t force players to be generous or gracious, but simply gives generous and gracious people the means to act on their inclinations in-game, just as it gives them the means to be greedy and callous. So far, most players seem to choose the brighter path. If nothing else, the game provides evidence suggesting that most people are inherently pro-social and good (or “good”, if you want to get philosophical about it), even when they are free to break the normal constraints of social behaviour, because it is inherently rewarding to be that way. And that is among a subset of people (multiplayer shooter gamers) not famous for exhibiting the best of human nature. I myself received a healthy hedonic boost this week when playing with beginner players (or “noobs”, in gaming parlance), shepherding them safely to low-level gear that they needed and helping them to extract with their loot and bodies intact. Given the game’s time restrictions, this meant I wasn’t able to loot anything useful for myself, or engage in any epic robot battles. But trading riches and white-knuckle excitement for the warm fuzzies of a kind deed done, and the thanks of my fellow raiders, was a good deal, and one not offered in many games of the shooty-shooty variety. As 2025 drags grimly through its final month, I’m grateful for whatever warm fuzzies I can get, even and especially when I find them in the most unlikely places.
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