The evil within the gamer

In class on Tuesday we discussed how gamers could end up doing things to save the future of a real earth. I blogged about the morality systems in games yesterday, and while I was writing it made me think of something. Through my experience of gaming I havent met too many people interested in saving the world at all, in fact most people i've met in games have a dark side to them that they let out when they are within a game. The best example to use for this would be an mmorpg, or Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. In these types of games millions of players play together and accomplish tasks to become stronger. In many of these games there are players that take on the role of a PK, or Player Killer. As the name states, these players find enjoyment in the game by killing other player's characters and stealing the items that the killed player has in their inventory. Being player killed can really halt progress for some people because it can make the player lose money, weapons, and expensive items needed for a certain event. Pretty much every player in an MMORPG would become a PK if they could, but many of the characters are weak and can't face high level opponents, so they would not be able to kill many players. PK's are cruel and have ways of killing players sneakily. When a PK stumbles upon a lower level character they may offer to help them train their character or trade them a rare item at a certain point, the low level character will consider it an act of kindness and follow the PK. The PK will then lead the lower leveled character out of a safe zone to where it is legal to kill players and take down their prey. This does not give me hope that gamers will be able to help out the world much. If we were all placed inside of a game world where levels were non-existent and players relied only on skill, there would be a majority of PKs. Nobody would take the time to do quests to help the world or further their character with no level system unless there was something in it for them to help their individual character to beat other players. So maybe we shouldn't place any trust in gamers to solve real world problems, because they come from a world where murder and theft is a completely normal thing with no consequences.