next »

[Chris Whitman]

This article is really quite awful in parts. The second half does a fairly good job of selling the social aspect of their game (They have some good ideas). But then there's the other half with such bizarre lines as,

Psychological experiments are interesting, but they have no value if they don't lead to influencing social behavior in real life.

To be fair, the purpose of behavior mod is actually a practical one. The writing in the article is perhaps not the best, but I think the general thrust of the article is correct: there are social problems in online gaming, and these really need to be addressed by developers.

Generally the first half could just be summarised as "I should be able to do whatever I want online, but other people shouldn't. Particularly those evil 'hardcore gamers' and by 'hardcore gamers' I mean 'idiots' because the terms are synonymous amiritegais?"

If your fun requires abusing others, be it verbally or through the misuse of gameplay, I don't think that should be permissible.

People who engage in socially unacceptable behavior typically do so because they get something they need out of it. Usually, especially with children (including teenagers), this is attention. In many cases, especially with children in their early teens or younger, to allow this attention-seeking behavior to persist can actually be harmful to their social development.

I don't think that video games are responsible for turning kids into monsters (obviously), but when these behavioral tendencies are already present, it is socially irresponsible of developers to provide a direct outlet for their expression solely through negligence. As a game designer, I don't think there is any escaping the responsibility you have to provide gameplay which is conducive to a healthy social environment.

That said, I think it's a good idea to talk about this, to bring up environmental elements which are conducive to positive behavior modification and to discuss how current environments may encourage the mistreatment of players.

[Movius]

This article is really quite awful in parts. The second half does a fairly good job of selling the social aspect of their game (They have some good ideas). But then there's the other half with such bizarre lines as,

Psychological experiments are interesting, but they have no value if they don't lead to influencing social behavior in real life.

To be fair, the purpose of behavior mod is actually a practical one. The writing in the article is perhaps not the best, but I think the general thrust of the article is correct: there are social problems in online gaming, and these really need to be addressed by developers.

Generally the first half could just be summarised as "I should be able to do whatever I want online, but other people shouldn't. Particularly those evil 'hardcore gamers' and by 'hardcore gamers' I mean 'idiots' because the terms are synonymous amiritegais?"

If your fun requires abusing others, be it verbally or through the misuse of gameplay, I don't think that should be permissible.

People who engage in socially unacceptable behavior typically do so because they get something they need out of it. Usually, especially with children (including teenagers), this is attention. In many cases, especially with children in their early teens or younger, to allow this attention-seeking behavior to persist can actually be harmful to their social development.

I don't think that video games are responsible for turning kids into monsters (obviously), but when these behavioral tendencies are already present, it is socially irresponsible of developers to provide a direct outlet for their expression solely through negligence. As a game designer, I don't think there is any escaping the responsibility you have to provide gameplay which is conducive to a healthy social environment.

That said, I think it's a good idea to talk about this, to bring up environmental elements which are conducive to positive behavior modification and to discuss how current environments may encourage the mistreatment of players.

The article has a very relativistic notion of 'anti-social behaviour', where anything 'negative' is treated with similar weight. ie...

"I had this terrible experience playing *GAME X* online, where I was racially and sexually abused by multiple people for half an hour straight."

"I know your pain man, once I was totally going to capture the flag and this guy on my team totally cut in front of me. It's like the holocaust all over again."

This is related to the main problem here, different things offend different people. Making the game 'safe' for one person by banning one action, might be removing part of the fun for another. Obviously, if you continue to cut out elements of the game you're going to piss off more and more people (See the poor reaction of many people to Nintendo's ultra-sanitised online play.) This is fine to a point, but eventually more people will stop buying your game until lost sales overtake new sales.

This magic point is different in the context of different games. Strict censorship of swearing and abuse might be accepted in Happy Flower Quest 23: Online; but in the games being discussed in the article, the content in online games is usually strictly about shooting people with guns until they are dead. So a sense of context might be useful in this case.

For mine, one of the main problems is the misguided sense of 'social responsibility,' in that 'It's up to the industry as a whole to fix things,' and that there should be a big list of things that game developers must and must not do.

This is, to put it mildly, utter shit. Game Developers are responsible for the content of the game, including the features of tools that facilitate online play, and the claims they make about the game ("OUR GAME IS FREE OF FUCKWADS.")

What they aren't responsible for is the action of players of the game and they definitiely aren't responsible for the content or players of games other than their own.

In my opinion, the best thing a game developer can do to 'fix things' is to provide people with the tools to protect themselves from offense (Key amongst this is the ability for players to host their own games with their own private rules and policies) or if they must limit the options available to players in this regard, then the developer should clearly advertise and enforce a standard of etiquette that they wish players to follow when playing the game.

One of the points of the article seemd to be "Fuckwads (Evil genocide commiting 'hardcore gamers') play Halo 3. Shadowrun had poor sales. Therefore Halo 3 is to blame." There are many good features in Shadowrun's online play mentioned in the article, yet to my knowledge none of these was ever made a selling point of the game. If there was a clear link shown between improved sales and advertising a game as 'Fuckwad Free', I think you'd see a lot more games with strict online behaviour policies.

The only conclusion I can draw from the article is that either; a) The makers of Shadowrun didn't do as much to combat misbehaviour as they claimed. or b) Game players/buyers just don't care as much as is claimed.

Thus ends my overly long rant on the subject.

[Chris Whitman]

I'm not sure what to say. Obviously I'm not going to make excuses for poor judgement.

But note that I, personally, am not talking about removing the ability of people to swear online, for example. I'm just talking about opening a discussion on possible methods to limit the ability of some players to abuse others, or to limit the psychological rewards they receive for doing so, and methods to reward positive behavior instead of punishing negative behavior. I've already mentioned I'm not really in favour of arbitrary bans. An immediate crackdown on a perceived offense is more likely to lead to avoidance behavior, in any case, than it is to discontinuing the original action.

I mean, yes, the article goes a bit overboard, but I want to reinforce the idea that, although I think this is a serious concern and something that should be talked about, I don't necessarily share their viewpoint on the specific implementation. Regarding your concerns that 'everything is abuse to someone,' there's no substitute for being reasonable. Obviously winning the game should not be considered abuse inflicted on the losers by the winners, but calling someone a 'fucking faggot' every four seconds is, in my opinion, abusive. How do we best deal with that? I don't know, but I think it's something that it's good to discuss.

Regarding responsibility, I think game designers should take responsibility for the social environments they help create. Obviously I'm not going to come to your house and make you: the idea is that you do it on your own, regardless of whether it helps or hurts sales, because it is a good thing to do. That's probably something that would fall on deaf ears for the mainstream game companies, who would like every endeavour to result in piles and piles of cash money (we had someone from EA in one of our classes discussing budgetary concerns the other day, and this sort of thing came up, although he was a lot more tactful), but I think indie developers are in a good position to look at the kind of behaviors encouraged by their games.

Think about Jon Blow's thing, right? The "all games teach, regardless of whether they're intended to or not. What does your game teach?" Well, all games also teach or encourage values, in some sense. It's incredibly naive to think that Grand Theft Auto teaches kids to kill all the Haitians for points, but at a bare minimum a game provides rewards for a certain behavior. Whether it is directly moralistic is predicated on a few things, including the perceived seriousness and sense of agency (my argument for a GTA-like game is that no one with even a modest grip on reality would assume this to be a lifestyle genuinely endorsed by the game's creators, so gravity is diminished). So, when the game hands out rewards for negative social behaviors (even though the action rewarded is really more of a metagame action), what does that teach?

I'm not saying games should punish negative behavior, but they certainly shouldn't reward it, and it would be good if players were rewarded in some sense for being nice.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I haven't read the entire thread, so perhaps this was mentioned, but how about allowing players to rate the "attitude" of other players? This seems like a simple way to avoid those who are antagonistic and to discourage it, while at the same time not censoring anything.

Alternatively, you could do what Tale of Tales did and just make an online game without the chat feature, so all communication has to be symbolic, through the gameplay.

[Zaphos]

This is related to the main problem here, different things offend different people. Making the game 'safe' for one person by banning one action, might be removing part of the fun for another.

There are potential solutions for that other than banning, such as just not matching players together if their tastes clash (eg, one curses and the other is offended by that).

For mine, one of the main problems is the misguided sense of 'social responsibility,' in that 'It's up to the industry as a whole to fix things,' and that there should be a big list of things that game developers must and must not do.

I thought the article was just saying, "developers should think more on making their own online communities such that more people enjoy playing in them, because it should help sales."

One of the points of the article seemd to be "Fuckwads (Evil genocide commiting 'hardcore gamers') play Halo 3. Shadowrun had poor sales. Therefore Halo 3 is to blame."

I didn't get a sense that they were blaming Halo 3 in the article.  Or really talking about Shadowrun's sales specifically at all?

There are many good features in Shadowrun's online play mentioned in the article, yet to my knowledge none of these was ever made a selling point of the game.

I don't think it's so much about directly advertising a game as 'fuckwad free,' but rather about the effectiveness of long term word-of-mouth advertising of the game.  If more people are hooked on the multiplayer, they're likely to spend much longer with the game and have more incentive to convince their friends to play as well.

If there was a clear link shown between improved sales and advertising a game as 'Fuckwad Free', I think you'd see a lot more games with strict online behaviour policies.

Except that part of the point of the article is that we don't yet know how to make a game 'Fuckwad Free'.  The developers talk about Shadowrun's features more as a 'proof of concept' that anything at all can be done, and then specifically noted that "[m]ost of the features are targeted towards hardcore gamers and not toward creating a community that is welcoming to new players."

The only conclusion I can draw from the article is that either; a) The makers of Shadowrun didn't do as much to combat misbehaviour as they claimed. or b) Game players/buyers just don't care as much as is claimed.

Or (c) a lot of other factors affect sales and that's not an analysis you can fairly make.

[Zaphos]

I haven't read the entire thread, so perhaps this was mentioned, but how about allowing players to rate the "attitude" of other players? This seems like a simple way to avoid those who are antagonistic and to discourage it, while at the same time not censoring anything.

Yes; I think the simple system of just rating whether you enjoyed playing with the other players, and then applying some transitive property of enjoyment ("If my enjoyment markings match well with some other player, for people we've both played against, then I'm likely to enjoy playing with people he enjoyed playing with in general") could potentially do a lot for the quality of matchmaking.

Alternatively, you could do what Tale of Tales did and just make an online game without the chat feature, so all communication has to be symbolic, through the gameplay.

It's very game specific (not a general solution) but it definitely made Endless Forest stand out ...

In terms of limiting features which could be 'abused', Disney's Toontown Online provides some interesting examples.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toontown_Online#Online_safety_features.  It's again not a general solution, but an interesting point in the 'kid friendly' design space which seems to have been relatively well received by its users.