Coltan Scrivner

In this case, they were at like a mansion, zombie apocalypse, third person, but fixed camera so you can't turn around.

Back in the day, you couldn't just save a game whenever you wanted.

You had to like go to a safe room to save it.

That's like extra scary, right?

You had to find the safe room to be safe.

That was my gateway into it.

It was a terrifying game for me, but it was like, if I can find the safe room, I can plan and collect myself and continue on.

Probably around the first year or second year of my PhD.

And like any good, curious PhD student, I was just interested in everything.

Okay, I have to kind of specialize in something.

And so I got kind of interested in these paradoxes about human behavior.

So one of those is that humans are interested in violence, but they find it morally bad, right?

So in almost every case, we punish violence and push it away.

But there are some cases where it's not only okay, but it's actually entertaining, right?

And we promote it.

Yes, or the Romans in the Colosseum is the classic example.

You find examples of this, usually it's ritualized in other cultures, and ritualized through games in our culture too.

And it was interesting to me that we could make this distinction in something that seemed so black and white.

There wasn't, certainly wasn't one that was founded on empirical work, really, right?

It was kind of theoretical conjecture, which is fine, but there was no, here's the study that tells you why we do this.