What happens when you apply a method used by anthropologists to track real-life human hierarchies to social dynamics of video games? Well, first of all, the results are pretty much the same.
A new study details how, since our earliest societies, human beings have sought structure in their social groups—easily classifiable as categories based on cliques, linguistics, tribes, and so forth. Curious about how far that structure went, a research group in Austria took it a step further: It studied the social interactions within video games.
As the video above shows, despite the virtual world providing cover for people to act startlingly less human, the standard human hierarchies still applied.
