 Virtual reality gaming is doing its best to break out from its current niche markets and into the mainstream. Games like Beat Saber and Half-Life Alyx have certainly been turning heads and slowly but surely it seems like virtual reality is growing. But for every Half-Life Alyx there are about a dozen other titles that go by completely unnoticed regardless of their quality. These titles are only known to those of us who have decided to take the plunge and become early adopters of this new technology. It is interesting in some ways that so many of these lesser-known viewer titles have such a heavy emphasis on multiplayer. I say it's interesting because with such a low pool of players compared to traditional flat screen gaming these multiplayer virtual reality titles really need to do something special to stay relevant. On the other side of the coin however it makes perfect sense because multiplayer in virtual reality adds that amazing sense of presence that you can't guess otherwise. But irrespective of that one thing I've always noticed about multiplayer virtual reality games is that the people you are matched with are usually nicer and more well behaved than those on flat games. I mean who doesn't have a story of a 12 year old kid on Xbox Live dropping racist slurs left and right. It's pretty much a meme at this stage. Virtual reality gaming was different however. I always chalked it up to two factors. One the player base is smaller therefore you've got less undesirables in the matchmaking pool and number two and this is just speculation on my part but I suspect the sense of presence in virtual reality plays a key part too. When the person you're tempted to be rude to feels like they are life-sized and standing or sitting right beside you you might think twice. Your brain doesn't feel like you have the safety of hiding behind your keyboard anymore even though it still does and it's just been tricked by the magic of virtual reality. But there was one game that was the exception. One game that was in virtual reality was multiplayer only and was rated E for everybody. Yet despite all this it was surprisingly toxic. The game werewolves within. You've arrived just in time for a town meeting. You see Galuston is invested by werewolves and the only way to solve this crisis is by eliminating the most suspicious individuals. Werewolves within is a multiplayer VR game for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Developed by Red Storm Entertainment and published by Ubisoft and released on 6th December 2016 when I first watched a video of this game being played on YouTube I was fascinated by it. It was unlike any other game I had played and it seemed like something that could only be done well in virtual reality. You see werewolves within is a social multiplayer game. It's based on a real life game called Mafia and its variant werewolves. When you play werewolves within you don't have a weapon you're not looking for headshots or worrying about a kill death ratio. Instead you're sitting down in a circle with a group of up to seven other players. I'm not going to explain the rules to this game because it can be pretty in-depth and it's better to just learn by playing. But the basics are this. There's two factions and werewolves within. The werewolves and the townsfolk. Technically there is a third one too but let's not muddy the water. At the start of a round each player is secretly assigned to a faction and given a role within that faction. As a townsfolk you want to figure out who among you is a werewolf and then agree with your fellow townsfolk to vote that person to be killed at the end of the round. As a werewolf you need to make sure neither you nor your werewolf teammates are voted for. So you must be deceptive, lie and cast blame on other players. There's more nuance and tactics than that but that's the essentials of the game. So when I got the game strangers who already knew the rules taught me how to play and the functions of the different roles and all of that stuff because I'd never played or even heard of mafia or werewolves so I was a complete noob to us. But I was having a great time. Honestly when werewolves within was at its best. It was my favorite multiplayer viewer game. This was before Firewall Zero REC. Back then it wasn't too hard to find a game of werewolves within. The people were nice, some people were drunk sometimes maybe, myself included but it was always a good laugh. Unfortunately that did not last. As the months passed werewolves fell victim to one of the most common problems with viewer titles. The player base dwindled significantly to the point where someone in the werewolves within community came up with werewolf lobbies.com. A site that let you see how many people were currently playing werewolves within so you could tell if you'd get a match or not. It is actually a pretty useful website if you're looking to hop into a match even today. Anyway while a lot of people left werewolves there was a few dozen people who were hardcore werewolves within players and as you can imagine these few people who remained became pretty familiar with each other. Perhaps a little too familiar in some cases. If you head on over to the werewolves within subreddits you can see a time capsule of issues before your own eyes. Most of the posts there are months old and it's pretty much a ghost town but among the dusty threads you can see a pattern of people calling out specific community members for trolling, bullying, time wasting, being over controlling on how the game should be played, people muting other players unnecessarily, abuse of the kick feature, the list just goes on and on and on. Reading the replies you can see that everyone here seems to know everyone else. The only exceptions being the occasional newcomer asking for tips or for players or something like that. Now this bad atmosphere carried over to the game itself. I remember returning to werewolves occasionally only to be warned by one of the regulars to watch out for this guy or that guy and sure enough that person would eventually come along and they'd be either drunk or overly aggressive or racist or sexist or combination of all the above. This became more and more prevalent from my experience. It felt like very often when I dropped into a room that the people I was matched with had some kind of issue with each other or were trying to make issue with each other or were rage-quitting or just in general unpleasant. I sort of became fascinated with werewolves within's playerbase. I've often remarked on this channel in the past either on the podcast or during live streams that werewolves has the most toxic playerbase of any viewer game I've ever played but it's not been until recently that I put any real toss into figuring out why that is. Why does a viewer game which is raised E for everyone and has very blatant family friendly aesthetic going on? Why does this game have a playerbase like this? And after thinking about it I've come up with two possible factors which I believe are contributing. Number one is the small playerbase. As I've mentioned already it's created this situation where everyone knows everyone else. There's cliques developed, there's people out to troll specific people, there's bullying, there's hardcore players with no patience for newcomers. It's all there. So in a game with a bigger playerbase I think a lot of this stuff could be avoided. You wouldn't be constantly matched up with someone you had an argument with, you'd just forget about it and move on. Instead what we have here are people being matched repeatedly over and over again carrying over bad blood and things just escalate. So the second reason then has to do with the kind of game werewolves within actually is. So like I said at the start it's not like any other game I've played and that's because to win you need to either lie to other real-life players or prove that someone else's lying. When you're doing this with real-life strangers that you've just messed and the first thing you're doing is you're accusing them of lying it can be easy to see how bad blood can develop there even though it's part of the game. Add in that sense of presence that Viora adds and you've got a potential multiplayer effect going on escalating things even further. Werewolves requires you to be hostile with your fellow players or at the very least you need to be suspicious. Now some people are just fine with that but everyone is different and some people just don't handle that situation too well at all. Something similar happens in board games like Monopoly for example where by the end even family members are not in speaking terms with each other anymore. I think some psychologists would find werewolves within an interest in social experiment. So I've realized I've painted a bad image here for the werewolves within player base but I do want to point out that there are a lot of werewolves within players who are great you know they're helpful they're funny they just want to have a good time they're not part of this at all but I still stand by what I say that werewolves within became more negative over time for the reasons that I've talked about already and I think it's interesting to look at why that was but maybe I'm way off with my thoughts so feel free to let me know in the comments below what you think yourself before I end this video let me give a huge thank you to my patreon supporters whose names are on the screen now thanks to their generosity I can devote more time to this channel and let me shout out the following top to your patreon supporters Columbus Thomas the third tradition crumb and Pete Hawkins thank you very much for your support it is a big help to the channel if you like to support the channel over on patreon the link will be in the description but you can also help me out the old-fashioned way by liking and sharing and all that usual shite also let me give a shout out to Decepticon for continuously allowing me to use his music and all my videos check him out over on Decepticon.com or Spotify or wherever it is you listen to your music that's it for this video I'll see you in the next one bye for now