There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying.
As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him – possibly with cheats – and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.
Another example on a official game forum… I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)… The response I got was some positivity but mostly just “lol nobody uses that sweetie” and other patronizing comments.
Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn’t make sense to me that no studio is saying “get lost” to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?
For a while now, I’ve been asking one simple question with a way I think could help reduce, if not eliminate, toxicity from players:
How do you gamify good sportsmanship?
If you can actually gamify and incentivize good sportsmanship in a tangible, meaningful way, it could do a lot to help with the crap commonly seen/heard in video game chats and forums.
I think that’s a very interesting question! I don’t have a good answer. In real life, this onus is on coaches, organizers, etc… so it’s always seemed like something that moderators should just need to actually do.
What bothers me about this with video games is that I know as a programmer, programmers are capable of just shutting people down when they do obviously disrespectful things like t-bagging, and in games that have explicit taunts… they’re perfectly capable of just giving players an option to disable taunts… but they don’t.
It’s kind of like chat filters, we don’t have to sanitize it for everybody, but there should be an option.
if youre really interested in the idea of gaminfying good sportsmanship, I think the Deep Rock Galactic community would be the best place to start. it’s not devoid of toxicity, but it has arguably the least amount of it out of any other online game. I think the devs mentioned they think a lot of it has to do with things like having a solute/celebrate button (hence why all DRG fans will communicate via yelling “ROCK AND STONE!”), although being a co-op non-vs game helps I’m sure.
I’ve generally been pretty happy with the Hunt Showdown community (part of what I think helps there is stopping to t-bag someone can easily result in you getting shot and losing a match, part of it is the dead person can’t see you t-bag, part of it is it’s an older crowd).
I also mostly stick to PvE destiny (i.e. avoid the PvP portion)… I’m largely fine, it’s just when I forget and go into one of these areas I tried to forget about I’m like “why is this still a problem? 🙃”
Taunting animations and t-bagging are pretty mild and I’ve always considered them in the realm of playful trash talk in the vein of things like “you’re going down, bro!” If they’re also talking massive shit while doing it, that’s a different story.
I think it’s a bit more disrespectful than “you’re going down, bro!” But typically when I’m thinking of this, I’m thinking of situations where the person has like a 10-0 KDR vs the person and is either clearly just way better or cheating and t-bags after every kill. It’s completely classless at that point.
Like, if it’s a fairly even match and occasional … sure it’s not worse, but when it’s mixed with outright domination (or as you said talking massive shit) it’s more than that.
In either case… it’s just so unnecessary.
It’s not impossible, it’s just not profitable. In most online games cosmetics are quite important. And you can easily make it that the only way to get them is by having a high community score or whatever you wanna call it. And even make it so that if your score drops, you lose access to them. There will still be assholes using the default model, sure, but I’m pretty sure most people will be going out of their way to be nice if there’s something in it for them. And after a while of forcing yourself to do something it becomes habit. And that may be a way to teach players to be nice. Dunno, just a thought
You can still profit and coax people into behaving better at the same time. Most stuff you pay for; but have some exclusive things for getting enough good sport points. And to keep up their good behaviour, they will lose points for bad behavior and can have those items taken away from them if they fall below the points needed to have them in the first place.
Or hell; even lose your paid for items. Like taking away a child’s toy if they misbehave. This is basically what a ban is anyway.
My only issue with this is that the only current and reliable way to get these points on your record would be to take the word of other players making reports. You could always get enough friends to circle jerk each other for good guy points, the same way you can bully players now with bad behavior reports.
Nah, players won’t accept the latter, as for the former, yeah, except most games I’ve played don’t give cool cosmetics for “free” like that. Cause if the free ones are just as cool as the paid ones, fewer people will pay, and they don’t like that. The most sought after ones are always the store ones or the 1% content ones
But yeah, I’d love it if a game actually did that
One obvious solution is to do what competitive sports do: hire a referee. I could imagine hardcore players paying a little extra per match to hire a referee and essentially guarantee fair play. Some players might want to make a little extra cash while still being involved in a game they enjoy.
Might be a tough proposition though, since it would be hard to scale to large online communities. Maybe with good enough tools, refs could manage multiple matches at a time.
The cheaper solution that some games already do is allow players to report toxic behavior and then a moderator will play back the logs and see if the report is legitimate.
It’s the question.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how you’d design a racing sim that rewards and gamifies clean racing but the basic answer is that you’d have to set it in world so different from our autoracing history and technology that you’d lose 75% of your player base who are mostly interested in real cars (the same way FIFA games appeal to people who want the real players, and don’t actually care about the game design of football).
On PS5 there’s platform native ‘Accolades’ where you can rate the people you’ve played with, but Bruce I never play the kinds of games that they’re designed for I have no idea if they’re used or how they even work. The point being though even Sony were trying to approach this topic at an OS/ecosystem level.