"Statistically, only one or two of the players in any given multiplayer match will be either very good or very bad."

An Einstein of the skies.

"...situational factors become much more apparent when we're the ones in a given situation."

With the launch of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, virtual bodies are hitting the floor like raindrops in a monsoon. Between these two titles, millions of people will have the opportunity to dive into some of the best multiplayer action available in the world of gaming. With the exception of free-for-all modes, these games are both cooperative and competitive. It's you and your team against the bloodthirsty crowd on the other side of the map. This scenario brings up the age old question: Why do my teammates suck?!?Inevitably, one of your teammates will jump into a jet and promptly get shot down. Another will drive the squad's jeep right over a landmine. Yet another teammate will empty an entire clip into the ninja that just knifed your whole squad and miss with every shot. You're about to pop off a headshot? Nope, your teammate is going to walk into your line of fire while you're trying to snipe.If you've played a multiplayer game, then you've experienced at least one of these scenarios. Sometimes these situations pop up because you're genuinely playing with unskilled players, but more often it's not that your teammates aren't particularly bad. They're just regular dudes. Statistically, only one or two of the players in any given multiplayer match will be either very good or very bad. Everyone else will be average, falling somewhere in-between awesome and awful. So if your teammates aren't actually all that bad, then why do they suck so often?The answer is not in the skill of your teammates. Instead, skill (or a lack of skill) is all about perception, and context is one of the most important aspects of perception. In different contexts, the same actions and even the same outcomes can be viewed in dramatically different ways. Remember the bonehead that walked into your line of fire? How could they know that you're lying flat on a rooftop a hundred virtual yards away? It's likely that they were just doing their best to flank the enemy. When presented with situations such as these, people tend to ignore their other person's point of view and over-emphasize dispositional explanations, such as incompetence, poor reflexes, or inexperience, while overlooking situational factors. In psychology, this tendency is called the fundamental attribution error.So why did your teammate run over that landmine? Because they're a bad driver, or they weren't paying attention, or they're an inexperienced or unskilled player. All of these explanations focus on the behaviors or attributes of other players. Of course, it's just as likely that an enemy soldier cleverly hid the mine or that the driver was distracted by incoming fire or their mother calling them from the other room. Maybe jeeps are just hard to drive. What makes attribution errors so insidious is that situational factors become much more apparent when we're the ones in a given situation. So, if you're the one driving the jeep, you're aware of all of the different issues that are affecting you at any given time, but if you're watching the jeep or, worse, riding in the back, then these outside influences seem much less important than your teammate's skill level or intelligence.Next time you jump into a multiplayer match, try to remember that skill only accounts for so much of what happens in multiplayer games. We're all vulnerable to distractions both inside and outside of the games that we're playing. The difference between you and everyone else is that you are fully aware of all of the outside factors that are influencing you, but human nature makes it difficult for you to easily grasp what's going on with your opponents and teammates. Outside observers might call what you're doing camping, but you know deep down that you're just playing smart defense. Of course, if you are a dirty camper, then you really do suck and you deserve the knife in the back that's coming your way.Fascinating - I thought it was because most players had the IQ of a carrot. What's the dumbest thing you've seen a player do in MW3 or BF3?