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We want to chat with game developers that can share their experiences building up their game community and trying to make sure it stays healthy as it grows. If this sounds like you, fill in this brief survey to get invited to a one-on-one interview.
This learning will help Unity identify opportunities to better support game developers as they build up safe and healthy game communities.
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What exactly is meant by safe and healthy here? Should we be telling the players not to overeat, get some exercise and sunshine and wear a biking helmet and for ghawdsakes don’t run with scissors in your meathooks.?
I would recommend you watch these 2 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRlYM9F50EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxBw4AK3RYs
In addition to that, something that I could witness myself in Insurgency compared to Insurgency:Sandstorm is that it makes a huge difference whether multiplayer games are “server based” compared to “matchmaking queue based”. Playing together with a group of people for more than one game in a row was huge for encouraging cooperative behaviour and positive interactions between players. Servers that regulars tend to come back to create micro communities inside the bigger community and if there are at least a couple people on a server that know each other well enough to set a positive example for cooperative gameplay, that can inspire some of the randomly joined players to join in. In Insurgency: Sandstorm shortly after release, there were no “servers” with people playing, and in the matchmaking queue you’d never stay together with a group of people long enough. The community experience was much much worse imho, even though it was almost the same playerbase playing these two games.
I think there is a lot of merit to the theory of games shaping their communities through their mechanics.
Then why is the pokemon community like that?
I don’t know a single thing about the pokemon community and never played one of the games. I think it’s something about capturing wild animals/monsters and making them fight against each other for entertainment purposes, and letting them get stronger by relentlessly forcing them through countless duels and exploiting the weaknesses of the other monsters. Correct? And the catchphrase was something about obsessively wanting to capture one of each monster species? So what’s their community like?
I believe there also was something about a mechanic where you trade pokemon with other players, maybe?
As a VR game and a ultra realistic one we mostly have adults in our discord. Sometimes discussion heats up but it’s often civil 
That’s a rather glib interpretation that doesn’t line up with the way the games present themselves and their systems.
Thanks for sharing these insightful clips @Martin_H .
If you have experience of your own building up community and dealing with the challenges of keeping them healthy/civil, we would love to talk to you. If you haven’t gone through our short survey, I encourage you to do so.
Thanks!
That honestly doesn’t answer a single thing he asked.
For example, I know what pokemon is, despite having never played a single game, but I genuinely have no idea what you meant when you said “pokemon community being like that”.
“Like that”? Like what? Is “like that” a good thing or a bad thing? Weren’t the pokemon games single player in the first place?
Pokemon is singleplayer the same way Call of Duty is singleplayer. The pokemon community is notoriously terrible and went on a months long campaign against the developers because the latest game didn’t include all 898 pokemon.
Given that this is the first time I hear about it… not very notoriously.
Might have something to do with the games being available exclusively on Nintendo systems.
Just because you aren’t aware of something in a game you didn’t even know what multiplayer doesn’t mean it’s not a thing.
This is grasping at straws. If you want a good community it’s more important to cultivate that community through interaction and outreach as well as laying down moderation guidelines. Making it so “the game doesn’t encourage it” is silly because nobody can actually lay down what makes this happen in the game itself.
The argument that games control the community around them instead of it being a community management factor runs parallel to the same “videogames cause violence” argument, where the realities of the situation are ignored in favour of whatever requires the least effort possible and has “theoretical” viability. But it’s never like that, and I’ve got an example.
World of Warcraft has been around for 17 years and one of their big problems became one of their roleplaying servers, Argent Dawn. On Argent Dawn, if you had a female character, if you walked into either of the main starting zone hubs, you would be bombarded with requests for erotic roleplay in your whispers. Often, these would be incredibly explicit. A lot of the them involved opening with a graphic depiction of sexual assault. If you wanted to level somewhere else, you’d have to walk all the way to another zone which, with the average speed of a WoW player, took about 15 minutes if you knew the fast route and 20-25 if you didn’t.
How did they approach this?
The problems persisted for a couple weeks after the situation started to get wider attention from the other servers. Eventually Blizzard stepped in and dedicated more GMs (a core part of MMO and other online game community management) for the problem areas. On top of that, they started enforcing increasingly strict policies on what would and would not get you suspended or even banned from the game. The immediate effect of this? Unsolicited messages on Argent Dawn decreased dramatically.
What about World of Warcraft’s game design, exactly, had people going feral over this?
Argent Dawn is still a mess, but it’s a mess where one of the biggest problem, one that has been applied across a few more roleplaying servers to similar effect.
It’s important to have as little moderation as possible. Evybody hate dumb moderation and moderation rules.
I think we have had to ask a maximum of 3 times to keep it civil in our discord and that’s about it.
Other discords and forums have 50 different rules that har policed with a iron fist, not a customer friendly approach
Sorry, none at all.
VR is the kind of solution like making your game cost 200$. That too will shape the community in a certain way I bet.
Thanks for the info! Like I said, I don’t know much about the game or the fandom. Watching detective Pikachu is the closest I’ve gotten to the franchise.
I didn’t claim the game mechanics angle to be the only factor, and I think neither should one do the same for moderation as a solution. E.g. how would you propose to solve Call of Duty’s toxicity through manual moderation alone?
I don’t play Blizzard games much, haven’t they made it so that they can ban you on their games for things you say on your private social media accounts or something like that? I vaguely remember there being some outrage about that.
Good points! I’m glad they got this under control.
I never touched MMOs or other hard drugs, so I can’t speak from experience, but to try and answer your question anyway: the ability to “whisper” to strangers seems like a very problematic mechanic. The anonymity of WOW accounts likely has a big impact on player behaviour too (you might not consider that to be a game mechanic, but I think it’s worth considering because it is an impactful part of the rules of play that shape the experience, especially on a roleplay focused server). I’ve seen a game implement a “personal bubble” feature that prevents people from getting close to you (they just vanish at close range), things like that combined with whitelisting mechanics and friendslists might help. Of course I do conceed, that a lot of changes that might “help”, might harm the intended core gameplay experience.
The main reasons I’m suggesting to think about game mechanics shaping community behaviour here is that in general I think people here put too little thought into gamedesign aspects, and for many indies it will be more feasible to adjust the design of a game with a little foresight than to hire an army of moderators that monitor ingame interactions. But of course your mileage may vary!
One other thing…
Having a person controlling the character had people going feral.
“There’s a person”, “They might be of compatible sex”, “You won’t be punched in the face for bad behavior”.
Now if you add to that a juvenile player, you can see where this is going to go.
Some very young people have been known going around social networks, boldly asking for intimate photos, sexual favors and so on.
Because it is hard to get punched in the face over TCP/IP, generally it is a good idea to have punishments in place for situations like that. Additionally, younger playerbase appears to be more likely to misbehave, but I might be wrong about that.
OK… I get it…safe and healthy means unoffended these days of twisting tongues and divergent definition. Sorry … this old codger grew up in the day when safe and healthy meant you were not in bodily danger and were not ill. Lord help me if I whined to my father that someone said something mean to me as all that I would get from that is the sticks and stones metaphor echoing in my ears. If I see something that may offend my sensibilities on the internets I just skim over it unless I can drop a sarcasm bomb on it.
Well, there were cases of people killing each other using a swat team, or driving others to suicide via social netowrk.
In context of gamedev it would means that developer would have one heck of incentive to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen on their servers and on their communities.
The internet also allows for hundreds of people to attack someone all at once, something which was very rare back then.
If it is just one a-hole, than you just ignore them. Sticks and stones and all that. But the human psyche was not really built to handle this kind of abuse from hundreds or even thousands of people all at once.
I get it. It is the terms I see used. Non-abusive and friendly would be properly descriptive. If I had a community and someone was abusive simply for a “bloodsport” I would metaphorically kick their ankles with some humor a few times to see what makes them tick. If I found a vulnerable kid playing tough guy I may have a few fatherly words with him and warn them they will be ban hammered if they cannot act with a modicum of sociability. If I found a sociopath or sexual predator I would ban hammer them instantly and turn the predators data over to the jurisdictional authorities… I would also have a list of words that get asterisked. That seemed to work well at zerohedge where the comments used to be raw and the profanities just whacked the sensibilities…but they began replacing the nasty words with asterisks and there was much less venom to them when read. Other than that folks are gonna argue and come from various cultural backgrounds. If they didn’t enjoy mixing it up then why twitter? Mind you some of those replies are bereft of anything but sewage level effluvience…
To be honest, why does i matter for Unity? No offence, but unity does not make games. Has long bad history with managing communities. Why devs would listen some Unity advisors on keeping community healthy, which has no direct contact with game development, but opinion is based on others opinion, rather than experience?
@MDADigital please don’t speak for whole Europe (again). As in the world, in EU there is plenty variation in culture and believes. I am in EU and I know plenty people, will find certain depictions as offensive. Is no point discussing if is right or not. Removing, or reducing potentially aggressive, or vulgar remarks, wont hurt community. And will bring chance to keep more people in. That is responsibility of channel admins, to recognize target audience.
Not recognizing that, will help loose your community.
@hamilton_unity
I co-manage past 2 years one small DC server around 200 members atm. It is for io game (none Unity). So the community is targeted around teens age.
Not many active members at same time. But certainly moderation input is required from time to time.
We allow moderate level of used language. But we do issue warns, when abuse, or aggression comes into play.
We do not allow for explicit images, neither such avatars, as were present above. We ask to change, when it happens however.
We do notice, that few aggressive and vulgar users, can put off many other users to participate and stop being active. So we trim them down, specially when multiple users report.
Bans also are issued occasionally, when no improvement in ethics is present.
We do not monitor voice channels however.
I don’t think there is anything special different in managing game community than any other.
Well, the maybe with one major point, which are review. Upset users, or haters may leave bad reviews. But for these who participate in community discussion, probably will be very small %.