Left 4 Dead (or L4D) is a first-person shooter with a simple premise- four people are stranded somewhere overrun with hordes of the living dead, and need to work together as a team to make it to safety.
The distinction between selfishness and altruism is an unnecessary one, and Left 4 Dead proves it. The interests of the individual and the interests of the group run parallel- the survival of the individual boosts the survivability of the group, and the survival of the group boosts the survivability of the individual.
The gameplay is beautifully designed to necessitate co-operation. The zombies come at you from all directions, and you’ll quickly find your health bar depleting if your teammates haven’t got your back. There are certain “super-zombies” that can incapacitate you and render you helpless, and the only way you can survive such attacks is through the intervention of your teammates. You may occasionally find yourself hanging precariously off a ledge- perhaps from a heavy blow from the Tank super-zombie, or perhaps out of your own stupidity- either way, you’ll need a teammate’s assistance to get back up. Everybody begins each round with a med-pack, which you can use to heal yourself or your teammates. Healing someone or helping them to their feet takes a few seconds, during which neither of you can do anything else- so you will have to depend on your remaining teammates for protection. Cries of “Look out!”, “Behind you!”, “He’s got me, help!” are common in the heat of battle. (Well, you’ll probably hear indecipherable screams and strings of vulgarities instead, but they communicate the same thing.)
No individual can survive the entire length of a game of Left 4 Dead on his own. You don’t have enough firepower on your own to eviscerate the hordes that overwhelm you, and the first super-zombie to incapacitate you will be the end of you, and the game. Teamwork is vital.
Being selfish in the conventional sense is a terrible survival strategy. If your teammate has lost more health than you have (suppose you have 70% health left, and he has 20%), and you have the last med-pack- you should heal him rather than yourself, even if you don’t really feel like it- because helping him is in your self-interest. If you don’t heal him, he will most probably die- and that means less collective firepower for the group, more focused zombie attention per player (including that of the dangerous super-zombies), and one less person to cover you, watch your back and intervene should you need assistance. 3 players are substantially less likely to survive than 4. You are far more likely to survive as an individual if the entire team survives as a unit.
The inverse also applies. Martyrdom and excessive self-sacrifice harms the group, and comes across as stupid more than anything else. Your team needs you alive, functional and firing. Dash ahead, and you become easy prey for the super-zombies- putting your teammates in unnecessary risk if they are to rescue you. If you’re the guy with 20% health, don’t refuse help or make things difficult- shut up and and let yourself be healed, and make sure you do everything in your power to avoid being so heavily hit the next time. Which brings us to an interesting truth:
A positive attitude, while desirable, is not sufficient. A good-natured player who’s encouraging, cheerful and ‘altruistic’ who regularly takes heavy hits, accidentally shoots his teammates, falls off ledges and triggers zombie-luring alarms, is stil a liability to the team. (Don’t we all know people like this?) He takes a disproportionate amount of damage, and constantly puts his teammates in danger, despite his best intentions. At the opposite end of the spectrum, an ill-tempered player who berates his teammates would still be an asset to the team if he’s a great shot with a keen eye, dispatching the super-zombies before anybody else even notices them. It’s easier to deal with competent player with a shitty attitude than an incompetent ‘nice guy’. This truth can be a little hard to swallow, but we can see it manifested everywhere around us, and we had better accept it as reality and work with it rather than deny it.
(Shitty attitudes are still disgusting, though, and I think they serve as their own punishment: no matter how great a player you are in-game, if you have a shitty attitude, people probably won’t even want to play with you to begin with. There’s a sort of greater justice that tends to prevail in the long run, whether you’re a narcisstic CEO or arrogant sportsman- if nothing else, you have to live with yourself and your ugly attitude, and that’s a pretty miserable prospect.)
That said, once you’ve got a decent attitude, the best thing you can do in a team setting is usually to be as self-sufficient and effective as possible as an individual. Be really good at what you do. This is fairly constant, whether we’re talking about school, business, the military or sports. ‘Selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ are oversimplistic concepts that are worthless labels in an increasingly complex world. It’s far more prudent to evaluate yourself and others as ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’. Intentions don’t matter nearly as much as we like to think they do.
Even in a fairly straightforward game like L4D, there will be times where you have to make difficult decisions- in the final stretch, for instance, the zombie horde gets a lot heavier- and it may be suicide to return for a fallen teammate. Sometimes you might have a situation where there are three wounded players remaining and just one med-pack- and you’ll have to decide who it should go to. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy- every playthrough is subtly different, and you’ll have to learn to evaluate the circumstances and make decisions quickly, and under pressure.
Real life is far more complex and challenging than a game of Left 4 Dead. You get to choose, to a certain degree, what you want to do and where you want to go. You define your own quests and missions, working with others to accomplish tasks. Sometimes you’ll get to choose your tasks or your teams, sometimes you won’t. You operate in many different ‘teams’ to fulfill many different ‘tasks’ simultaneously- your family, your friends, your communities, your nation-state, what-have-you. Co-operation is usually the best strategy, but you may not always be able to achieve it. If concepts like ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ are too simplistic for a game like L4D, how can we really use them in real life?
It’s perhaps best to evaluate people not as ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’, but as ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’. The next time you encounter a person who strikes you as selfish, think of the player in L4D who ‘selfishly’ hoards his med-pack, and is subsequently worse off for it. By being selfish, he’s sabotaging an opportunity to build a mutually beneficial relationship with you, or somebody else. That’s his loss. You can move on, but he has to live with himself. Sucks to be him. The same applies for anybody who is overly ‘altruistic’, to the point of self-sacrificial martyrdom. He’s going to be exploited by others, and then resented by them for it. Sucks to be him, too. What matters isn’t whether you’re ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’, but that your decisions are effective and sustainable, both for you and your team.
All of that said and done, there is one constant in your life, and that’s you. If you take the trouble to invest in yourself- to be competent, self-sufficient, to learn to communicate effectively with yourself and others, then you will be an asset both to yourself and others. And enlightened self-interest means understanding that it is in your self-interest to be a genuine asset to others.
Left 4 Dead: Enlightened Self-Interest In A Zombie Apocalypse
Left 4 Dead (or L4D) is a first-person shooter with a simple premise- four people are stranded somewhere overrun with hordes of the living dead, and need to work together as a team to make it to safety.
The distinction between selfishness and altruism is an unnecessary one, and Left 4 Dead proves it. The interests of the individual and the interests of the group run parallel- the survival of the individual boosts the survivability of the group, and the survival of the group boosts the survivability of the individual.
The gameplay is beautifully designed to necessitate co-operation. The zombies come at you from all directions, and you’ll quickly find your health bar depleting if your teammates haven’t got your back. There are certain “super-zombies” that can incapacitate you and render you helpless, and the only way you can survive such attacks is through the intervention of your teammates. You may occasionally find yourself hanging precariously off a ledge- perhaps from a heavy blow from the Tank super-zombie, or perhaps out of your own stupidity- either way, you’ll need a teammate’s assistance to get back up. Everybody begins each round with a med-pack, which you can use to heal yourself or your teammates. Healing someone or helping them to their feet takes a few seconds, during which neither of you can do anything else- so you will have to depend on your remaining teammates for protection. Cries of “Look out!”, “Behind you!”, “He’s got me, help!” are common in the heat of battle. (Well, you’ll probably hear indecipherable screams and strings of vulgarities instead, but they communicate the same thing.)
No individual can survive the entire length of a game of Left 4 Dead on his own. You don’t have enough firepower on your own to eviscerate the hordes that overwhelm you, and the first super-zombie to incapacitate you will be the end of you, and the game. Teamwork is vital.
Being selfish in the conventional sense is a terrible survival strategy. If your teammate has lost more health than you have (suppose you have 70% health left, and he has 20%), and you have the last med-pack- you should heal him rather than yourself, even if you don’t really feel like it- because helping him is in your self-interest. If you don’t heal him, he will most probably die- and that means less collective firepower for the group, more focused zombie attention per player (including that of the dangerous super-zombies), and one less person to cover you, watch your back and intervene should you need assistance. 3 players are substantially less likely to survive than 4. You are far more likely to survive as an individual if the entire team survives as a unit.
The inverse also applies. Martyrdom and excessive self-sacrifice harms the group, and comes across as stupid more than anything else. Your team needs you alive, functional and firing. Dash ahead, and you become easy prey for the super-zombies- putting your teammates in unnecessary risk if they are to rescue you. If you’re the guy with 20% health, don’t refuse help or make things difficult- shut up and and let yourself be healed, and make sure you do everything in your power to avoid being so heavily hit the next time. Which brings us to an interesting truth:
A positive attitude, while desirable, is not sufficient. A good-natured player who’s encouraging, cheerful and ‘altruistic’ who regularly takes heavy hits, accidentally shoots his teammates, falls off ledges and triggers zombie-luring alarms, is stil a liability to the team. (Don’t we all know people like this?) He takes a disproportionate amount of damage, and constantly puts his teammates in danger, despite his best intentions. At the opposite end of the spectrum, an ill-tempered player who berates his teammates would still be an asset to the team if he’s a great shot with a keen eye, dispatching the super-zombies before anybody else even notices them. It’s easier to deal with competent player with a shitty attitude than an incompetent ‘nice guy’. This truth can be a little hard to swallow, but we can see it manifested everywhere around us, and we had better accept it as reality and work with it rather than deny it.
(Shitty attitudes are still disgusting, though, and I think they serve as their own punishment: no matter how great a player you are in-game, if you have a shitty attitude, people probably won’t even want to play with you to begin with. There’s a sort of greater justice that tends to prevail in the long run, whether you’re a narcisstic CEO or arrogant sportsman- if nothing else, you have to live with yourself and your ugly attitude, and that’s a pretty miserable prospect.)
That said, once you’ve got a decent attitude, the best thing you can do in a team setting is usually to be as self-sufficient and effective as possible as an individual. Be really good at what you do. This is fairly constant, whether we’re talking about school, business, the military or sports. ‘Selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ are oversimplistic concepts that are worthless labels in an increasingly complex world. It’s far more prudent to evaluate yourself and others as ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’. Intentions don’t matter nearly as much as we like to think they do.
Even in a fairly straightforward game like L4D, there will be times where you have to make difficult decisions- in the final stretch, for instance, the zombie horde gets a lot heavier- and it may be suicide to return for a fallen teammate. Sometimes you might have a situation where there are three wounded players remaining and just one med-pack- and you’ll have to decide who it should go to. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy- every playthrough is subtly different, and you’ll have to learn to evaluate the circumstances and make decisions quickly, and under pressure.
Real life is far more complex and challenging than a game of Left 4 Dead. You get to choose, to a certain degree, what you want to do and where you want to go. You define your own quests and missions, working with others to accomplish tasks. Sometimes you’ll get to choose your tasks or your teams, sometimes you won’t. You operate in many different ‘teams’ to fulfill many different ‘tasks’ simultaneously- your family, your friends, your communities, your nation-state, what-have-you. Co-operation is usually the best strategy, but you may not always be able to achieve it. If concepts like ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ are too simplistic for a game like L4D, how can we really use them in real life?
It’s perhaps best to evaluate people not as ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’, but as ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’. The next time you encounter a person who strikes you as selfish, think of the player in L4D who ‘selfishly’ hoards his med-pack, and is subsequently worse off for it. By being selfish, he’s sabotaging an opportunity to build a mutually beneficial relationship with you, or somebody else. That’s his loss. You can move on, but he has to live with himself. Sucks to be him. The same applies for anybody who is overly ‘altruistic’, to the point of self-sacrificial martyrdom. He’s going to be exploited by others, and then resented by them for it. Sucks to be him, too. What matters isn’t whether you’re ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’, but that your decisions are effective and sustainable, both for you and your team.
All of that said and done, there is one constant in your life, and that’s you. If you take the trouble to invest in yourself- to be competent, self-sufficient, to learn to communicate effectively with yourself and others, then you will be an asset both to yourself and others. And enlightened self-interest means understanding that it is in your self-interest to be a genuine asset to others.
You can indeed have it all.
If you liked this post, you may also be interested in Mass Effect 2 And Loyalty Missions.