Is It Possible To Fix Gaming Toxicity?

the year 2016 saw one of hearthstone's most interesting and controversial balance changes they didn't alter the power level of a card or even one of the heroes instead blizzard decided to remove an emote specifically the sorry emote which was deemed too powerful for mortal hands and deleted from the game entirely but why well it was because although the intent of the emote was to allow players to apologize for taking too long of their turn all for commiserating with an opponent who just made a mistake more often than not players just use it sarcastically to aggravate their opponent or to mentally screw with them sorry isn't the only ammo that got changed either there used to be an emote that let you call the opponent lucky which went down about as well as you'd expect and one for saying good game which exclusively got used to preemptively call a win and was changed to the much more complementary well played emotes in hearthstone were introduced in order to try and curb the kind of toxicity and rudeness that normally emerges in multiplayer games but even after all those changes players are still using emotes to be toxic by spamming them while stalling out games or using the thanksy mode sarcastically to express their gratitude for an easy win needless to say communication systems and games are complicated without them we lose that crucial feeling of cooperative or competitive pressure that makes multiplayer games so fun however they also enable a bunch of unfriendliness and toxicity that can drive players away from games they'd otherwise enjoy to make matters worse the two default means of communication in games text and voice are probably the worst offenders particularly in public games where talking with randos on the internet and not your friends in textual communication it's almost impossible to tell the difference between sarcasm jokes and genuine sentiment and it takes ages to say anything of substance voice chow on the other hand not only requires you to own a high enough quality mic to accurately communicate your thoughts but it also lacks anonymity as anyone who's not a white dude in their 20s to 30s will attest using voice comms is a dicey proposition and can open people up to a whole spectrum of abuse ranging from your classic i [ __ ] your mum to more specific bigotry involving very special gamer words beginning with the letter n nincompoop obviously so if text and voice are bad methods of communication and even the most well-meaning alternatives can be subverted what hope is there for developing communication systems that allow players to strategize build up healthy rivalries and convey their ideas clearly without also enabling people who'd end up being abusive well i think the first step is an understanding that these problems are linked whilst people on the internet are basically always going to behave like dicks when they're shielded by a username toxicity is made worse in situations where people are a unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings clearly without resorting to insults and b are rewarded for being a dick and for riling people up if you want proof just look at how youtube comments or social media sites like twitter with short message lengths and a culture that incentivizes engaging only with the most emotive messages creates nothing but petty snap fights tribalism and misinformation so by allowing people to communicate clearly and efficiently as well as pushing them to be nicer hopefully we can help to curb the rising tide of internet toxicity let's start by taking a look at non-verbal communication methods like emotes gestures and emergent communication while hearthstone's implementation is far from perfect systems like emotes solve a very important problem and that's giving players the ability to communicate emotions quickly and efficiently without needing to yell down a mic or risk being misinterpreted via text giving players the ability to communicate what they're feeling as well as what they're thinking is hugely important as it allows for nuanced social interactions that actually increase the depth of an experience rather than just making it easier to play back when i first played the world of warcraft legion expansion i was running around with my demon hunter killing harpies when i ran into a much higher level character from the filthy horde also doing the same quest normally in world of warcraft players from opposing factions are encouraged to attack each other on site and can't talk to each other through the in-game chat it's not called world of peace craft for a reason because i almost certainly would have lost this engagement i ran away which led to something really interesting happening this tauren monk spotted me walked over to where i was hiding and performed the wave gesture communicating that they'd spotted me but weren't going to attack i waved back then they knelt showing respect in kind i jumped down from my little perch and helped to kill the boss this was a completely emergent social interaction that really spiced up some otherwise pretty boring quests and wouldn't have happened if the game didn't have robust nonverbal communications tools dark souls does the same thing the only way to communicate with players is either through emote gestures or indirectly through signs left on the ground this leads to a lot of really fun social gameplay that gels surprisingly well with the hope triumphing over oppressive darkness motifs of the series stuff like organizing fight clubs playing pranks with the soapstone signs to get people killed or creating cool inside jokes by giving players tools that are abstract enough to be useful in a lot of situations but tailored such that it's difficult to interpret them in a hostile way like you can with anduin's sarcastic voice my apologies players could have much more fun interacting with each other and would have to resort to abusing other unrelated mechanics in order to get their thoughts across everyone who's played a shooter after all knows about teabagging where players will crouch up and down on a defeated opponent in the ultimate falloccentric show of humiliation it's not just crouching that gets abused either pretty much any mechanic or system a video game has to offer can be used to make a statement and the late great jeff freeman even coined the term time to dick which measures how long it takes for a player to use a system like dropped items or terraformed earth to make you guessed it an elephant with a cold trying to completely lock this stuff down will drive anyone insane and usually does more harm than good i think the games with the most successful communication systems are the ones that make communication flexible and fast enough such that this sort of behavior isn't really needed and players can express frustration or animosity in a constructive way a great way to do this is through dedicated taunts like you'd find in fighting games emotes that are specifically designed to be slightly cheeky and inflammatory but not outright mean allowing players to satiate the impulse to mess with an opponent without making things toxic when taunts are embraced by the designers they can even become a part of the mind gamey high level strategy of competitive games and there is a brilliant core a video on exactly that subject that i will link down below this brings me neatly on to the other side of the coin namely tactical communication talking about your feelings is all well and good but multiplayer games thrive on letting players engage with the fun of strategizing and teamwork in competitive games like shooters mobas or rts you need to communicate tactical information quickly and efficiently and for the reasons i brought up earlier neither voice chat nor text are particularly ideal luckily there are a variety of ways to handle this but they all center around making conversations streamlined and efficient by cutting human ambiguity out of the equation for example the tribes games now murdered by hi-rez pioneered what's called the vgs system which are a set of short form communications options that allow players to send pre-written messages using only a few key presses for example v then a for attack then t for turret sends a message saying that we should attack the enemy turrets v f for flag then d for defend is our flag needs defending typing in v g s itself makes your character say shazbot which is a weird reference to a 1970s robin williams sitcom where he played an alien i've got no idea why either dota 2 in spite of its community's incredible toxicity also has flexible short form communication alt clicking on any element of the game's ui from your health to an enemy spells to an item on the floor will immediately send a status update to all of your allies keeping them in the loop or announcing your intentions in a fraction of the time it will take to type it and in the total war games you can even draw on the map to show your allies which flanks to strike at where to place their battle lines and oh look it's another elephant on top of being way more efficient these sorts of systems can also help to curb toxicity unlike simple typing there's almost no room for misinterpretation or aggressive language and responses can be very quick meaning that there's no time for players to stew and get even angrier in between messages the best example of tactical communication however comes in the form of apex legends is ping system yeah i never thought that a highly competitive fast-paced shooter where you're shackled to other people that is played almost exclusively by twitch wannabes would have amazing social communications tools but it's 20 20 now anything can happen see by holding down your middle mouse button or the appropriate controller button you can bring up a wheel of context sensitive communications options to quickly and concisely talk to your teammates see an enemy give them a ping and they'll be automatically flashed up want to propose a location to scout out next ping on the map want to show that an area has already been looted and there are probably enemies about ping on an open door or supply grate and the game will do it for you it's simple effective and most importantly of all locational in games without pings you have to rely on fiddly subjective descriptions like that building over there no no not that one the one i'm looking at no no no over there the one to the left of it the left of it no no no the other your left your left not my left up we're dead whereas in apex you can just immediately point it out for your teammates and not only will it appear on their screen they'll also get an audio reminder as your character announces it over the comments as well way out there you can even request items confirm you've spotted allied pings and thank other players to ensure that you're always on the same page massively cutting down the chances for miscommunication unfortunately though even a system as good as apexes will never eliminate toxicity completely because internet dickery isn't just a systems problem it's also a people problem and that's why no matter how good your communications tools are people are still gonna use them to be jerks what's more our usual moderation tools like banning muting and reports don't really address this problem because in order for them to work somebody has to have already been toxic and someone has to have already been offended they're punitive and not really very preventative like i discussed earlier i think the best way to reduce this kind of toxicity is to reward people for building positive relationships instead of validating their anger with an argument or a punishment to this end lots of games offer incentives for being nice like gwent the witcher card game in card games it's very easy to get angry at your opponent and imagine that there's some sort of cheetah or that they've just so happened to draw exactly the right cards at exactly the right time because there's often very few opportunities for direct communication and empathy between players this often leads to situations where people try to screw with each other in ways that upset the game like timing out your opponent or being rude with emotes to circumvent this at the end of each game of gwent you have an opportunity to push this button and to give your opponents a little bit of cash there's basically no downside to doing this so you'll probably do it a lot but it serves as a nice incentive to play nice and a reminder that you're both here for the same reason the good old free to play grind in final fantasy xiv if you queue for dungeons with random players and beat it successfully you'll have a chance to give another player on your squad a commendation for being helpful nice or just for playing well once you reach certain accommodation thresholds you can unlock stuff like cool pence a crown and if you manage to get 3 000 you get this and i do not use the term lightly heckin chonko good boy to ride around in mmo dungeons it's easy to blame a wipe and lost progress on your teammates and commendation systems like this one serve as a reward for not indulging in those impulses and making everyone feel welcome my favorite example of a game that encourages positive social interactions however is one that you might not have guessed it's not a hugely popular game nowadays and it's not a game that you can play with your friends it's the gorgeous the groundbreakingly fantastic social adventure game journey by that game company no not that one that one yep in journey the critically acclaimed game that i unintentionally ripped off you're shackled to a companion throughout the entire length of the game and in certain parts of the story you're even reliant on them but thanks to journey's brilliant approach to communication i always felt like i was totally in sync with my buddy and sharing in the sheer joyfulness of the game even if i couldn't actually talk to them see in journey the only real form of communication you have is to sing or jump up and down and that means the only emotions and ideas it's really possible to convey are very simple and are ultimately driven by the context of the game when me and one of my friends found a hidden secret in a cave the singing became a hey look over here and then it turned into wow ah isn't this cool when we became separated we used long loud notes to fight each other again and when we were getting chased by a big scary monster it became a way of expressing our fear in journey there's no need to strategize or share complex information so all of your communication reflects the simple joy of running flying and sliding around its beautiful world but that's not all uh some spoilers forthcoming the game is ancient but if you somehow not played it and still care skip to this timestamp singing can be used to charge up scraps of fabric you see around the world including your friend's cape which you both use to fly so by sticking together and communicating with little chirps and humped a lot you can explore much more efficiently and find way more cool things to get excited about later on in the game in the ice mountain or when there are enemies about you're also encouraged to stick together to keep each other's health from dropping or to keep each other alive when their concerts in in the second to last level you've got to make your way across a desolate wintery wasteland and inevitably you and your friend will be forced together spamming the sing button in a desperate futile attempt to stay alive as your voices get weaker and weaker in this moment i was more connected to my anonymous companion than i have been to characters in multi-million dollar blockbuster games as we fought on against the odds powered only by our shared bond and in the final stage of the game where you get to zoom up the mountain that spammy communication turned into an expression of joy and triumph as we raced up the temple structure to our final destination together journey is a magical experience because it uses absurdly simple tools to bring players together and encourage them to act as a team all without using any words at all some of these people i met on my adventure may very well have been puppy kicking nazi game makers toolkit fans and i didn't really care journey gives players no reason to come into conflict and brings out our best selves and really that's what we've got to keep in mind video games can only go so far on their own to remove toxicity when you strip away the sleek systems and rewards for being nice all that really remains is human nature players and developers need to work together to make digital spaces more welcoming to people and the best ways to do that can be found in some of the games we looked at today we need to encourage players to bond and express their emotions remove barriers to quick and efficient communication and most importantly of all encourage positive interactions by minimizing sources of conflict we all have the potential to be rude toxic and abusive but we also have it in us to be empathetic and understanding and while it might be harder using those skills will make games nice to play for everyone in the long run so if you could just stop playing video games and just leave me alone thereby raising the niceness saturation to 100 that'll be great the gamey community which is to say just me thanks you for your service hi and thanks for watching this video has been in the works for a while has gone through several iterations and is finally at a point where i'm kind of happy with it i hope you enjoyed for those who don't know at the end of every video i like to plug a cool internet thing and also give a shout out to my top tier patrons my plug for this video is the great podcast this game changed my life hosted by julia hardy and ayothi wilson covering a bunch of really interesting stories about video games and real life intersecting it's kept me sane during some really boring editing work it's great give it a listen on the bbc website i also need to give a shout out to my top tier mysterious benefactors if you'd like to join them consider throwing me a few bucks on patreon those cool people are alex doloch assaran baxter hill big chess bodhi brian notariani daniel manches david dumatrasku david cester dirk jan karen beld doodle hog evie elliot goldscinch george sears eberthon janos fakete jordan joshua binswanger kai gillespie lee berman lucas slack lunar eagle 1996 mace window 54 max philippov knox patrick romberg philby the bilby prospero rey's dad samuel vanderplatz sheldon hearn steve reilly strategy in ultima and ciao okay thanks for watching uh the next video should be a little bit less research heavy if all goes to plan so i will see you soon bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 234,267

Rating: 4.7059045 out of 5

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Id: 1BOJLcklWsc

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Gwannyn]

Everybody has to deal with toxicity, but if white dudes in their 20s aren't complaining as loud as the rest, that's probably because they're not as fragile as the rest. Studies show that men get a lot more harassment online than women, but women feel that what they get is worse, whereas men have had to learn to deal with it and grow a thicker skin.

[u/Bluescorpion76]

Responding to the article, not the OP in case it isn't obvious.

That's how guys communicate. Excuse me if I don't have my balls in my girlfriend's purse and I talk like guys have for centuries. There are mute buttons and all women groups, the solution has always been there. Let the boys have their fun, thanks.