The Internet is moving away from its roots of anonymous users lurking on forums. With a few notable exceptions like Reddit and 4chan, online spaces are discouraging commenters who hide behind meaningless usernames. Facebook and other social networks strive to be “identity platforms,” and increasingly rely on real names to stop community abuse. The assumption is that people will behave better if they are unmasked.
Gaming, an arena in which people are usually known only by their handles, may be moving in the same direction. Sony announced its next-generation PlayStation 4 will tie gamer tags to social networks, though it’s too early to know how deep this integration goes. Microsoft’s famous Xbox gamertags can also tie back to your Windows computer.
While these actions are intended to benefit online communities, Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, and Jeffrey Lin, lead social systems designer for the extremely popular free-to-play game League of Legends took issue with that idea.
Poole and Lin spoke at the Two5Six conference in Brooklyn Saturday, on a panel called “Online Communities and Growing Pains.” Two5six brought together experts from inside and outside video games to discuss what gaming and other cultural disciplines could teach each other.
Lin has a psychology background, but was hired by League of Legends creators Riot Games to help the company create a huge community that was accessible and welcoming, and to “solve the problem of online rage.” It’s quite a challenge; free-to-play games like League of Legends, with a low barrier to entry and highly competitive play, have a reputation for toxic environments intolerant of new or inexperienced players.
Lin says flashing one sentence at the beginning of League of Legends reduces player toxicity every time. That sentence? “If you behave poorly, you will be punished by one of our systems, the Tribunal.”
The Tribunal, as Lin explains it, is the section of League of Legends where players can decide the fate of other players who have had complaints filed against them. The worst cases get prioritized by user vote, then players decided how bad the action is, whether a user is a repeat offender, and if that merits banishment from the game.
Since League of Legends is free-to-play, Lin points out that banning players isn’t a long-term strategy, since they’ll just come back and make new accounts. He said Riot Games instead sends banned players a note telling them why they were banned, referencing chat logs and videos from the games as evidence.
“We found that people sent us letters back telling us that they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong,” Lin said. “If you give players incentive to be good, most players gravitate towards that direction.” “If you give players incentive to be good, most players gravitate towards that direction.”
Players are generally good or neutral, Lin said, and allowing the community to create its own standards has proven that to him. He also said most offenses come from people who might be having a bad day, or who are playing in a ranked match that is more important than just casual play.
Poole said he sees the same thing in 4chan. While the community is anonymous, Poole says there are hidden social norms that people have to be aware of before posting. Step out of line — granted, 4chan’s “out of line” is probably a little different from the rest of the web’s — and the community will jump on you.
“The community self-regulates, and I’ve had a hands-off approach. I don’t want them to to be affected by me,” Poole said. “We may be at the wheel, but we don’t control the wind. The community is its own force to be reckoned with.”
To experiment with a more open, welcoming community, Poole recently created an iPad drawing game called DrawQuest. It gives players a daily challenge to draw based on a prompt — an outlet for people who don’t normally consider themselves creative. It’s a wild departure from 4chan, which is notorious for its NSFW content and Internet in-jokes.
“The community [I normally deal with] was more young and more masculine, and we were worried the tone would turn off average people. We wanted to have the young, old, women and men and kids, and have them all coexist peacefully. The design goal was make every adult feel like a kid,” Poole said.
DrawQuest is somewhat limited in its community scope, in that there is no way for users to converse outside of the drawings.
“We also didn’t include comments because we thought it was a vector for abuse. The thing we were most concerned about was the ‘time ’til dick’ in DrawQuest,” said Poole, referring to the time it would take for a player to receive a penis drawing from anonymous user.
Both agreed it was most important to set the tone early with any community. Poole said the first couple comments on any thread always tended to set the tone for the rest of the conversation.
Do you think anonymity is dangerous or beneficial to web and gaming culture? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Author: Chelsea Stark
