Major game studios join hands to fight Toxic problem

Gender discrimination, race and harassment in online games have always been a concern for many gamers, even though they have been repeatedly condemned by big companies like Blizzard, Riot and Twitch. To try and combat this problem more effectively, 30 different studios, including Blizzard, Riot, Twitch, CCP and Epic created The Fair Play Alliance. The goal is to “cut down on disruptive behavior” in online games.

The Fair Play Alliance will use research and lessons learned from the online gaming community to try to create a universally accepted code of conduct for the online community. In addition, it will identify and understand the root causes of these bad behaviors. Deciding what’s acceptable and what’s not can be challenging, according to Kimberly Voll, Riot’s game designer: “There are a lot of challenges when you’re trying to define how good behavior is – or what bad is – on a global scale.”

First, acceptable or respectful behaviors vary widely across cultures and groups. With online gaming becoming more and more global, this will be a difficult challenge. Second, among close friends, they will accept ‘cursing’ and ‘trash talk’ with each other because they are already friends and it is just for entertainment, whereas in the case of mutual love strangers to each other is considered very repulsive. Therefore, the perspective or content of the story is quite a challenging element that needs to be carefully considered.

Voll acknowledges the failures that Riot has tried to address toxic online behavior. She also mentioned that the famous League of Legends streamer Tyler1 was the result of a careless calculation between Riot and Twitch. While their punishment was meant to deter Tyler1, it turned him into a youth idol. “I think this is a good example where we can draw from and understand the consequences, because on the one hand, we know well how easy it is to fall out of the game world and try,” Voll said. lead to broader living values. But on the other hand, everything here is online. No more real world or virtual world. This is reality. Streamers are ambassadors of the larger culture, not just League of Legends or any other game. They are the representatives of online life.”

The first step that The Fair Alliance will take is communication problems, like what happened between Riot and Twitch in the Tyler case. This issue will be presented at the GDC conference on Wednesday morning local time and Voll will be the speaker. At the conference, game developers and publishers from Activision, Epic, Supercell, and many others will discuss a variety of topics such as the research they’ve found on online game toxicity, the problems they’ve found in online games. encountered and the mistakes they made, more importantly, what lessons they learned.

The Fair Play Alliance is definitely a step in the right direction to deter bad behavior in the online gaming community. Let’s wait and see what The Fair Play Alliance will achieve in the long run, even though it is only recently created.

The Fair Play Alliance has its own website where anyone can join.

Source: Kotaku