Detailed Analysis of Player Behaviour in Games: GTA 5 and Beyond

This report provides an in-depth analysis of player behavior within the context of video games, with a specific focus on Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA 5). The analysis covers various aspects of player interaction and experience, including trolling, where players intentionally disrupt the game for others; playbour, which refers to the labor-like activities gamers engage in to earn in-game rewards; and the uncanny valley, which explores the impact of realistic but imperfect character representations. The report also examines player affect, discussing how games can influence emotions and decision-making, and the public sphere, considering the game's impact on real-life events. Furthermore, the report touches upon the concept of affordances, examining the technical infrastructure and design elements that enable player interactions within the game. The report draws upon various research papers and studies to support its claims, offering a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted relationship between players and the games they play.

Running head: ANALYSIS OF PLAYER BEHAVIOUR IN GAMES
Analysis of Player Behaviour in Games
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ANALYSIS OF PLAYER BEHAVIOUR IN GAMES
Table of Contents
Trolling.......................................................................................................................................2
Playbour.....................................................................................................................................2
The Uncanny Valley..................................................................................................................3
Player Affect..............................................................................................................................4
The Public Sphere......................................................................................................................4
Affordances................................................................................................................................5
References..................................................................................................................................6

2ANALYSIS OF PLAYER BEHAVIOUR IN GAMES
Trolling
Games like GTA 5 are Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) that is it provides
online interactive gaming sessions to the players. It is an open world game comes and with an
AAA rating which means considerable investments are made by the developers to offer a vast
gaming world to a community of huge number of players. Each of these players can have a
different taste of extracting fun out of the game (Koster, 2019). While some may only like
death matches where they focus on their Kill to Death K/D ratio to highlight their skills,
others can have their fun through ruining the game for another player. This can be running
players over with cars for no reason, dropping cars over them using heavy lift helicopters,
creating road blockades with exploded cars and busses. The player versus player (PVP)
aspect of the game ensures a player gets to do whatever he or she chooses with the other
players playing the game online (Morey & Crider, 2019). At times this leads to a menace as
higher ranked players with more game time may use their financial might to wreak havoc in
the gaming world time to time forcing the newer and less ranked players to exit their current
gaming session and join different server hoping that other high ranked players in the next
server are not doing the same. This trolling activity is quite a regular phenomenon observed
in all Grand Theft Auto (GTA) games as they are meant to offer fun and complete freedom to
the player base in the gaming world.
Playbour
The term playbour refers to the labour that gamers have to perform in order to have
greater experience through better equipment, vehicles, rewards and farming of in-game
currency. GTA 5 is also on such game in which the concept of playbour is heavily
implemented (Fothergill & Flick, 2016). This is especially observed in the multiplayer and
co-op modes of playing the game where with completion of every mission and winning

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competitive sessions like death matches and team death matches, players are rewarded
monetarily with in-game currency. In GTA 5, players can also buy houses, buildings and
properties, different types of cars, machines and weaponry (Chitta, Feng & Hebert, 2018).
This is where the in-game money gets used. By luring the players to buy fast cars to complete
certain missions more successfully or show their might with luxury cars, buildings and real
estates the game forces the players to invest more game-time. This increases the competitive
nature among the gamers in multiplayer sessions and highlights the need of performing
certain activities more regularly so that no drop in player count is observed in the servers.
This also helps the most loyal players of the game as the gaming world in each servers
remain full of active players that encourages more player to player interactions. Similar terms
to playbour can be ‘grinding’ or ‘farming’ where players need to perform stacking reward
points so that they can unlock certain missions and exclusive game assets (Sobociński, 2019).
Some games also offer these assets to be bought with real world currency enabling players
with less game time to access to access the assets.
The Uncanny Valley
The game GTA 5 offers different gaming modes to the gamers. These are the single
player mode, the multiplayer mode and co-op mode. The single player mode only includes
one particular gamer and all the rest of the characters in the game behave as per the A.I.
based code written for them. Since a vast open world game like GTA 5 can involve hundreds
of characters in various regions of the open world environment at any given time, the A.I.
code developed for each of the characters needs to be efficient so that it does not hog the
CPU resources of gamers. This leads to the developers in focussing towards better codes only
for the bosses and special characters like say friends of the protagonist. While all the other
characters who are roaming the streets, browsing the shops, the shop keepers are programmed
such that the workload demanded by these characters on the CPU is significantly less. This

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results in the gamers experiencing a stark difference between the behaviour major characters
and the rest of the characters in the gaming world. This leads to gamers performing all sorts
of fun and trolling activities with the generic characters waking on the streets, the police as
well as the emergency response staff. While the multiplayer mode mostly involves
interactions between different real-life players they also get experience A.I. based characters
like shop keepers and ordinary citizens. In the co-op mode, the gamers work together to
defeat the A.I. based opponents thrown at them by the game.
Player Affect
There are several ways in which players may get affected when playing a game like
GTA 5. This is due to the fact that GTA 5 is an open world game where violent actions,
killing, rude behaviour and domestic violence among others. Some may feel that this can lead
players to feeling justified with violent acts by drawing comparison situations they deal
within the game and in real life (O'Connor, 2016). This is one of the reasons violent video
games are subject to controversies in several countries including United States. However,
cognitive scientists on the other hand have observed that action based video games can train
people take the right decisions more quickly. Also, since GTA 5 includes skills like watching
for curves on the road will driving cars at high speeds as well as flying of glider planes,
playing games like GTA 5 can have positive affect on people when controlling vehicles and
machines. Playing the game thus increases the focus of individuals and helps them take
accurate decisions very quickly (Lungaro & Beelen, 2017). Moreover, recent researches have
pointed out that more playing time in faced paced action games like GTA 5 can significantly
improve visual skills as well as help in developing trained tasks for introducing specific
improvements in the vision of people that can lead to enhancing their quality of living.

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The Public Sphere
Among the public sphere GTA or Grand Theft Auto games have thus resulted into
drawing comparisons with real life events and tackling them. Those who have played GTA
games in some form or another will agree how the game helps them improve their decision
making skills and be very responsive while driving on roads. GTA 5 happens to have a
familiar set up as compared to the previous releases of the game. However, the latter presents
the player a true open world experience from the very beginning and does not lock locations
till certain progress in the game storyline is made by the player. This makes GTA 5 a very
popular game even now despite having released about seven years ago (Beerthuizen, Weijters
& van der Laan, 2017). People still continue to buy the game as it is one of the only few
games that do not require a DLC to keep players investing in it. If the graphics may appear
outdated to some, players are free to improve it through various mods and textures made
available by a number of mod authors and artists. Some of these mods can completely overall
how lighting of the game environment occurs, thus offers more realistic shadows, colour
bleeding, reflections, refractions and translucency where they are needed.
Affordances
The game GTA 5 has been developed by the studio Rockstar Games and they make
use of a fairly sophisticated network infrastructure to make the gaming services available to
the player. For single player, the entire game installation happens in the storage device of
gamers but for multiplayer sessions they are hosting the game in their workstations and
servers but offloads it for additional resources as per the need and player traffic to data
centres (Pellicone & Ahn, 2017). Critical services like creation of gaming sessions,
connection to servers, user authentication and match making are done through the platform
provided by the cloud service providers to the gaming studio (Lessel Altmeyer & Krüger,
2018). The services are then presented to the client PCs (Personal Computer) of the players.

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References
Beerthuizen, M. G., Weijters, G., & van der Laan, A. M. (2017). The release of Grand Theft
Auto V and registered juvenile crime in the Netherlands. European journal of
criminology, 14(6), 751-765.
Chitta, K., Feng, J., & Hebert, M. (2018). Adaptive semantic segmentation with a strategic
curriculum of proxy labels. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03542.
Fothergill, B. T., & Flick, C. (2016). The ethics of human-chicken relationships in video
games: the origins of the digital chicken. ACM SIGCAS Computers and
Society, 45(3), 100-108.
Koster, S. M. (2019). Between the Gloss and Reality-How gender representations have
meaning in a play world: a case study on Grand Theft Auto V and Mirror’s
Edge (Master's thesis).
Lessel, P., Altmeyer, M., & Krüger, A. (2018, October). Viewers' perception of elements
used in game live-streams. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Academic
Mindtrek Conference (pp. 59-68).
Lungaro, P., & Beelen, T. (2017, September). Augmented Reality Interfaces for Enabling
User-centric Experiences in Intelligent Transportation Systems. In Workshop on
Augmented Reality for Intelligent Vehicles.
Morey, S., & Crider, J. (2019). Hyperanimals: Inverting Nature Through Pokémon Go. ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
O'Connor, J. (2016). " The Character Feels That Way, Not Me". Player Driven Narrative
Experiences in Grand Theft Auto IV (Doctoral dissertation, Flinders University,
School of Humanities and Creative Arts.).

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Pellicone, A. J., & Ahn, J. (2017, May). The Game of Performing Play: Understanding
streaming as cultural production. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4863-4874).
Sobociński, M. D. (2019). Quality of Video Games: Introduction to a Complex Issue.
In Quality Production Improvement-QPI (pp. 487-494). Sciendo.