Great article!
Over the past year, I’ve had the interesting experience of running several games at a conference (not related to gaming) for groups composed of players who mostly have never played an RPG before and each game has had at most two veteran players. Now, it’s been D&D because that’s what these newbie players have been curious about because of Stranger Things or the cultural moment that D&D is having, so that skews toward “bad faith” play as you note.
But what I’ve seen based on this anecdotal experience is this: completely new player embrace good-faith play, perhaps default to it, and veteran [D&D] players totally suck at it and default to bad-faith play. The simple explanation is that they’ve been actively conditioned to do that through their experiences in games, or that they’ve passively absorbed bad-faith gaming culture. The newbies look to me as the GM to instruct them on ways to play that make the game fun and smoothly functional.
So, hypothesis: maybe the most good-faith play is seen in those who haven’t yet had the gaming experiences that acculturate them to bad-faith play, or in those who have enough perspective (through exposure to different styles and systems of play) to reject bad-faith play?