作者：Jamie Madigan

先描述一个我认为所有人都经历过的情境。你选择了一款游戏，比如《战争机器3》、《星际争霸2》或iOS游戏《Ascension》。

你打通了单人战役并在遭遇战模式中体验了数场战斗，或许你会选择困难模式，因为你是标准的硬核玩家。通过本地排行榜，你发现自己成为好友中最强的人。你觉得自己已经完全精通这款游戏。

所以，你决定联网与他人对战，参加排位赛、锦标赛或自由配对比赛。但是，你在这些网络比赛中的成绩并不理想。

在比赛结束后，结果令你感到很困惑，因为之前的数据表明你已经完全掌握了这款游戏。

这说明你已经进入了心理学家所谓的“达克效应”（游戏邦注：D-K effect，全称为Dunning-Kruger效应，它是一种认知偏差现象）。

1999年，康奈尔大学心理学教授David Dunning和他的学生Justin Kruger发表了相关论文，该效应的名称便源于二者的姓名。这种效应描述的是，那些并非擅长于某种事物的人高估了自己的技能，而真正的专家却往往会认识到自己的不足之处。

perceived_knowledge(from horas-perdidas.blogspot.com)

原因在于，在某些复杂任务中（游戏邦注：该效应在困难和复杂任务中的表现尤为突出），你拥有的技能越丰富，就越能够明白自己的欠缺。

比如，真正优秀的吉他演奏者比新手更明白能够用这种乐器来做哪些事情。同样，那些游戏技能不佳和经验不丰富的玩家往往对游戏中存在的可能性缺乏清晰的认识。

因为你的能力不够，所以你不能正确地评估自己的技能。而因为你无法正确评估自己的技能，所以你的能力无法获得提升。

在Kruger和Dunning最初的研究中，他们在逻辑、语法和幽默感方面测试学生。当研究者让参与者猜测他们在这些测试中的表现时，研究者发现表现最差的参与者往往会高估自己的能力。

比如，只答对12%的人猜测他们的正确率是62%。经过进一步调查发现，表现越差的参与者就越会高估自己的能力，因为他们的能力不足以判断任务的困难程度。而且，他们并不知道这一点。

我觉得，我经常在电子游戏中发现这种情况，尤其是那些竞争性多人游戏和那些能够通过排行榜与他人比较的游戏。单人模式的游戏往往允许你可以在无需提升能力的情况下获得趣味，这会进一步加剧这种趋向。

在《战争机器3》中，我们可以向敌人扫射，无需寻找有效的掩体或选择合适的武器。在《星际争霸2》中，只需要使用Marine就可以打通战役模式，无需针对敌人的军队配备合适的兵种。在《魔兽世界》中，你可以靠放风筝来击杀许多怪物，无需组队或搭配合适抗性的装备。

在上述这些情况中，你获得的有限反馈并不足以让你明白自己的不足之处。

这里存在一种“知道自己不知道”，以及“不知道自己不知道”的情况。我可能不知道铍的熔点或魔法师敌人的冰冻法术冷却时间，但是我知道自己确实未掌握这些内容。但是，还有些事情是我不知道的，而且我甚至都不知道这种东西的存在。

出现后者这种情况，便是由于达克效应在起作用。优秀的玩家能够意识到自己的失误之处以及错过的机会，并且不断战胜自己获得提升。新手未必察觉到这些，他们为偶尔的爆头感到困惑，因为他觉得自己做得并没有错。

有些游戏强迫新手玩家学习游戏的真正内涵，由此来解决这个问题。尽管我在上文中用《星际争霸2》来展示达克效应，但是这款游戏也尝试解决这个问题，游戏邀请玩家完成多人挑战，这期间他们会学到防守及其他高级战术。这样的方法的确很有效，游戏还可以采用社区指导或视频来展示深层次内容。

所以，当你下次发现自己的排位赛名次与预期不符时，花点时间来熟悉那些你不知道的内容。然后，从那些真正令人惊叹的硬核玩家处学习经验。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Here’s why you’re surprised when you stink at multiplayer games

Jamie Madigan

Let me describe a scenario that I think we’ve all been in. You pick up a game like Gears of War 3 or Starcraft II or the deck-building iOS game Ascension.

You jam through the single-player campaign or do a little comp’-stomping in skirmish mode — maybe even on the second-to-hardest difficulty ’cause you’re totally hardcore like that. And you’re better at the game than anyone on your friends list, judging by the local leaderboards and the way nobody will play with you anymore. You’ve got this game figured out, man, and you think you’re pretty good.

So you decide to venture online and try your hand at ranked ladder matches, a tournament, or maybe even just some pickup games via online matchmaking. You get creamed. Murdered. Owned.

At the end of the match, your competition has left you with a kill/death ratio in a realm of negative numbers so low that mathematicians hadn’t even bothered to think about it yet because they figured nobody would ever use them. This baffles you, because by all previous accounts you’re totally awesome at this game.

Congratulations, you’ve encountered what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Named after the authors of a 1999 paper by Cornell University professor of psychology David Dunning and his then graduate student Justin Kruger, the effect describes how those who really aren’t very good at something overestimate their skill while those who are experts tend to sell themselves short.

The reason is that the more skilled you are in some complicated task (the effect is more prominent for difficult, complex tasks), the more you understand that there’s stuff you don’t understand. Or that you haven’t mastered.

Really good guitar players, for example, understand everything the instrument is capable of better than someone who has only now figured out how to bang out the beginning of that one Blink-182 song. Similarly, those of us who are really bad and inexperienced at a game often lack a true understanding of what’s even possible.

You can’t accurately reflect about your own opinion of yourself because you’re not good enough. And you’re not good enough because you can’t accurately reflect on your own opinion of yourself.

In their initial research, Kruger and Dunning gave students tests of logic, grammar, and humor (really, he had them evaluate the LOL potential of jokes from the likes of Woody Allen and Al Franken). When the researchers asked the subjects to guess at their performance on these tests, they consistently found that poorest performers overestimated themselves.

Someone in the 12th percentile, for example, would guess that they were in the 62nd percentile. Further investigation showed that the poorer performing subjects overestimated their ability simply because they weren’t good enough to know how difficult the tasks were. And they didn’t know it.

I think I see this come up in video games a lot, especially ones with competitive multiplayer or even just those with challenges that let you compare your performance against others via leaderboards. It’s exacerbated by the fact that the single player versions of games often allow you to be incompetent in the pursuit of fun.

You can soak up bullets in Gears of War 3 instead of using cover effectively or choosing the right weapon for the situation. You can brute force your way through a campaign scenario in Starcraft II using just Marines instead of appropriately countering the enemy’s army build. You can kite mobs around in World of Warcraft instead of using teamwork and assembling a set of equipment or list of perks with the optimal resistances.

In each case, you’re frankly quite incompetent, but the limited feedback you’re getting doesn’t allow you to know it because you’re simply not that good at the game.

Think of it in terms of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I may not know the melting point of Beryllium or the cooldown on an enemy mage’s frost bolt spell, but I know I don’t know that. But there’s also stuff I don’t know that I don’t even know exists or is a factor. Like what implications that enemy sniper’s loadout has on my ability to sneak up and backstab him in Team Fortress 2.

The latter is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. The great player sees every misstep and every missed opportunity for perfect play, and beats himself up over it. The novice bumbles along missing all that but getting the occasional headshot, and thinks he’s doing all right for himself.

Some games are learning to address this fact by forcing novice players to learn the true scope of the game. Starcraft II, despite the fact that I’ve been using it to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect, actually tries to address it by inviting players to complete multiplayer-oriented challenges where they learn things like unit counters, defending against rushes, and other advanced tactics. This kind of thing helps, as well as curating of community guides and videos illustrating everything a game has to offer.

So next time you find your ladder rankings of your K/D ratio not living up to your expectations, take a second to reflect about all the things you don’t know and how your experiences so far may have been designed to make you feel more competent than you really are. Then go pick up some tips from those totally awesome hardcore players who know how totally awesome they really aren’t. (Source: Gamasutra)