Part 4 - Toxicity

Part 3 (if you missed it).

Although players are primarily responsible for their conduct in life, and games, this post is directed toward developers, and I hope to persuade you to consider the role you play in setting the tone of behavior within your community, and take an active role in guiding the way your community expresses itself during gameplay. Of course, there must be game features which allow players to shield themselves from harassment, like a mute button or a tool to report a player. You might even for example reward players with cosmetic items for good behavior and punish bad behavior by suspending communication privileges or by slowing down the rate at which they can earn those items through gameplay. But these interventions that sit outside of play, while absolutely necessary, do not address the causes of toxic behavior originating in the vicissitudes of gameplay.

Developers also bear the responsibility for devising a gameplay environment which caters to cooperation over self-interest, and sincere communication over harassment. Multiplayer games offer a wide variety of experiences represented by cultures built around them, with some having a poor reputation, such as games in the MOBA genre like Dota or League of Legends, and shooters like CS:GO or Call Of Duty, and others having a good reputation, like Deep Rock Galactic or Squad. Managing toxicity within the playerbase is thus about more than just providing players with a mute button. It’s also about the concept and design of game mechanics leading players to cooperate with one another and making that cooperation genuinely rewarding.

Game design sits at the heart of this issue. Many games are zero-sum, where one player’s success in moment-to-moment gameplay comes at the cost of another’s, sometimes within the same team. Team based multiplayer games can reward players with a win after some time for cooperating, but they might also just lose. For cooperation to be genuinely rewarding, players need to be rewarded for it the moment they make that choice. It should be easy to understand why games which are solely focused around a cooperative experience, like Deep Rock Galactic, usually have friendlier and less toxic communities than games that provide a competitive experience. But a competitive game is not doomed to toxicity. In fact, within the space of competitive gaming, design decisions can make cooperation more or less rewarding.

Dota 2

In Dota 2, the play area contains a variety of non-player-character enemies which can be “farmed” for XP and gold. This pool of resources is finite, and all players share the pool. Some heroes in Dota are initially weaker and require more resources to get stronger, and a meta has developed of allocating as much of the farming resources as possible to those heroes, while the remaining players make do with what scraps they can find. Players voluntarily choose to do without, hoping that the player that takes the resources will eventually be strong enough to help them win the game. In other words, a player’s success is often heavily dependent on another player’s success. Not only that, but the team as a whole only has a chance at winning if they make this sacrifice. So in Dota, cooperation is only sometimes rewarded with a win, and other times not rewarded at all. Not only that, but players which make this sacrifice also can end up much weaker and less capable of playing to their hero’s potential than if they had taken farm. This often leads to conflict between team members, where players criticize each other for not utilizing the available resources efficiently.

CS:GO

In Counter Strike: Global Offensive, players earn money from eliminating enemy players or planting the bomb, which they can spend on weapons at the beginning of each round. Players who are performing well will have enough cash to buy themselves the more powerful weapons they desire. In the case that they have surplus cash, they also have the option of buying weapons for players who are underperforming and unable to afford their desired weapon. The cash pool is not shared by default, but players are able to share their surplus with their teammates. This mitigates the burden of resource allocation. However, Counter Strike is a competitive game where the team must outperform the enemy team as a whole, and if teammates continue to underperform, blame and criticism is sure to arise. The practice of purchasing a weapon for a teammate is only rewarded if the teammate can utilize the opportunity given and their efforts result in a win. The buy system creates the potential for reduced toxicity, but in practice this may not eventuate.

In both of these cases, as in many competitive multiplayer games, the issue is centered around individual performance, and the only rewards for cooperation hinge on a win or loss match result. When players are losing, they might resent the effort spent on cooperation and consider it wasted, since it amounted to nothing.

Squad

Squad is a multiplayer shooter showcasing large-scale warfare between teams of up to 100 players. With teams of this size, a match win or loss is almost never decided by an individual performance. Matches are typically longer, lasting nearly an hour on average. The match victory is decided by a ticket resource system. Each player respawn, the destruction of some team infrastructure objects, and game objectives have an associated ticket cost. The first team to lose all their tickets loses the match. While players are spending a shared resource pool to spawn, the cost of spawning is minimal, and the cost of infrastructure or objectives is large by comparison. Objectives and infrastructure objects also tend to require the efforts of multiple players to address, so individual players are not intended to attempt to deal with them alone. Squad encourages players to use VOIP features to communicate and ask other players to help them with their tasks. An individual effort is markedly de-emphasized in Squad compared with other popular multiplayer games.

As the title suggests, Squad is focused around squad-level tactics in warfare. The game places players together in squads, and reinforces this arrangement by providing squad members a shared VOIP channel, and highlighting them green on the map (other members of the broader team are highlighted blue). This shared VOIP channel becomes the most convenient method of asking other players for help with tasks, like capturing objectives or destroying enemy infrastructure. This structure ties the squad members together in a diegetic way, and coupled with the requirements of gameplay, can result in a spirit of genuine cooperation between them. Squad overall provides a very good basis for mitigating toxicity among its playerbase. Toxicity is still sometimes present, but its impact on the community is typically less strongly felt than in other team based multiplayer games.

Here are some strategies for reducing toxicity potential in gameplay:

• Always reward players for cooperation in the moment, rather than waiting for a future win or loss to decide its value.
• Allow high performing teammates to help underperforming teammates.
• De-emphasize the importance of individual skill in obtaining a win or loss.
• Avoid punishing players for failing to cooperate; cooperation must be optional, but rewarding.

These last two points are easy to achieve in cooperative games, but difficult to achieve in competitive games. In competitive games, if one team cooperates and that cooperation improves their chances of winning, the bar for cooperation is set higher for the other team. The other team must then cooperate to the same or greater degree in order to win, or if they don’t, they risk being punished by losing. The nature of competitive games inherently puts cooperation on a knife edge. By many small and large design choices, including increasing the player count, and by placing player communication at the center of gameplay, Squad absorbs individual efforts within the team effort and makes cooperation genuinely rewarding despite the odds.

That’s the end of this series. Thanks for reading!