ABSTRACT
Human-on-human predation occurs online, most clearly through harassment, griefing, and trolling. Yet there is some predation of a sort that is accepted and, moreover, actually intended within certain games: Player versus player (PvP), found in some massively multiplayer online games. PvP allows to ask if people form larger online communities in scenarios where they are threatened by other humans, compared to when they are not. Data from EverQuest 2 was used, a game which includes both PvP and player versus environment, and that includes guilds, a common type of in-game community. At both times it was found that PvP guilds had a greater number of accounts, suggesting safety in numbers, and that accounts in PvP guilds at both times had fewer characters per account, suggesting a need for specialization when facing other human challengers. Research shows humans reacting to the digital threat of other humans in the same way that humans evolved to do: by forming relatively large groups.
