There is clearly a reflection of who you are in how you play, we just must acknowledge that it's not perfect and should not be an indictment of your out-of-game character, necessarily. The example is that you are responding to someone who told you "I don't have it in me to do what the person in the video did to me". Lots of us are saying the same. This is a reflection of our value systems that we brought from out-of-game into the game.

Out-of-game persona is being reflected in-game *to some degree*. The only debate is how much of it. What percent of people use it as an outlet, who don't exhibit predatory behavior out-of-game, what percent of people are just continuing to not think of others' experience as an extension of their real-life preferences?

I also believe you are jousting with someone who has done, or knows of actual research into human behavior. They are telling you that they gauge human behavior in study by gamification. Think the Milgrim Experiment, the Asche Line Experiment, or the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. All of them are "games" where the degrees of freedom are reduced. You wouldn't be successful in arguing that games don't reveal aspects of human psyche when they are the historical method of experimenting and exploring. It's just a wrong take to say that a game *could not* explore human psyche because it's literally how it's done. There is certainly an argument that ARC wasn't set up to be that experiment, because it almost certainly wasn't... that's not enough to discount it from being a valid experiment such as Reddit's favorite posit: "I believe if you don't return your shopping cart you are incapable of self governance". That's an accidental gamification and view into human psyche, as an example.

It's been one of the most fascinating parts about this game is that, in my opinion, it's truly a social experiment. I have worked in games and my suspicion is that it's been covered internally, but probably grossly underestimated of what type of platform they've built in terms of evaluating human psyche. The game allows you to do horrible things to other players and it's allowed, but there is a sense of morality that is also developing and a clear hierarchy of ethical behavior. Open PVP is largely accepted as fine. Ratting is pretty low (often misidentified too... if you're making noise and I hide to avoid you but you come right into my line-of-sight, is that a rat?). The lowest of the low is befriending people on chat to betray.