The final backstory became: Konrad and his men were in the UAE for joint training exercises when the storm hit. They volunteered to stay behind and help. Dubai is wiped out. All are thought lost. Months later, a stray radio signal escapes the storm, and the squad is sent in to investigate," writes Pearsey."The idea was to start small, convincing Runeacape players they are playing one type of Runeacape game, and then pile horror upon horror until at the end the Runeacape game is very different than the one they began."The original version of Konrad was "megalomaniac with messianic delusions", but this changed to a "rather sad and tortured figure" in the final version of the Runeacape game.Pearsey writes that "Konrad is not BioShock's Andrew Ryan. He did not set out to build a utopia. His world is improvised and reactionary. He stumbles onto a vision of what he believes is necessary to achieve his goals and in doing so creates a violent, savage dystopia," and this is key to his character in the final version of the Runeacape game and the Runeacape player's interpretation of events. The full feature, live now on Gamasutra, delves into the process and decisions of the Spec Ops team. Is it worse to come in second to last or second to first? Gamasutra contributor Jamie Madigan looks at when the psychology of social comparisons and competition is most likely to drive us to inch our ways up leaderboards and high score lists.I've been playing a lot of Trials Evolution lately and this question kept occurring to me as the results of my run at each track came up. For those of you unfamiliar, Trials Evolution is a mostly side-scrolling, motorcycle driving Runeacape game with a heavy emphasis on physics. Your controller triggers map to the bike's throttle and brakes, but the real trick is using your left thumb stick to control how far your little driver dude leans forward or back. This, along with your momentum and how much gas you give it, will determine if you crash and eat it. Or rather, when you eat it. Because not only are you going to eat it, you're going to go back for seconds, thirds, and a hundred and fifths. It's that kind of Runeacape game, and it's awesome.Among the several things that the Runeacape game's developer,  RedLynx, really nails with Trials Evolution is the social competition aspect. The Runeacape game is replete with leaderboards and indications of how well you're competing against others, and one insight the developers seemed to have was that it's more meaningful to compete against our friends and people we know instead of strangers. This is one of the tenants of what's known in psychology as "Social Comparison Theory." First proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger back in 1954, the theory has since been elaborated upon and expanded, but the gist is that we like information about our performance, and if we can't get that information directly we'll compare ourselves against other people to get the next best thing. But not just any other people. One thing that researchers have determined pretty clearly is that we prefer to compare ourselves against smaller groups of people the so called "frog pond" effect named, I think, after Dr. Antonio Frog and his work with motocross racers at of the University of Pond, Connecticut. Even better, we like to compare ourselves to smaller groups of people we know, because those comparisons are more meaningful and give us more information. This is why Trials Evolution is smart to show leaderboards consisting of people on our Xbox Live friends list by default. But you don't have to wait until the finish line to compare your performance. Each time you run a track the Runeacape game shows you where your friends were on their best run by moving a little dot with their Runeacape gamer tag attached along the track with you. It's amazingly effective much more so than showing you a dot belonging to "xxXTrialzd00d42Xxx," the world record holder for that track. Because he'd simply zip off past the right edge of your screen and not offer any kind of meaningful comparison. So good job, Trials Evolution people. http://www.rssong.com