Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
If you've played an extraction shooter like Arc Raiders or Marathon, you've probably experienced the agony of trusting another player only for them to shoot you in the head and nick all your stuff. Whenever that happens—and it's happened to me more than I'd like to admit—the same questions run through my head (after the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth). Was that always going to happen? Did I do something wrong? Should I have said something different? Behaved differently? Or should I have simply foregone any attempt at diplomacy and shot first?
I've often wondered if there's a way to get better at this. Not just to convince other players that I'm not a threat, but to make them not want to shoot me. Conveniently, I recently had the chance to speak to someone who knows a thing or two about resolving such situations, both in videogames and real life.
James 'Pigeon' Fielder is one of only two political scientists in the world who specialise in gaming.
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