Driving Positivity in Video Games

This blog article is a follow-up to a webinar by Anybrain and Bodyguard.ai presented within the Fair Play Alliance. The entire webinar can be found here.

The topic of the webinar was “Driving Positivity in Video Games” and with this blog post, we hope to develop a little bit more of the ideas that we present there.

It is well known that gaming is not a 100% healthy environment for industry professionals, studios, and most important of all, gamers. Gaming suffers from a negative reputation due to a misunderstanding of these communities, what drives them and how they are a key part of positivity in many gamers day to day lives. Although gaming has shifted to a more positive environment from its past, things still remain in communities such as toxicity and even violent behavior. These problems along with cheating and even scams constitute a real challenge for studios in the modern day as they become more elaborate and harder to trace which makes dealing with this issue a key priority.

WHERE DOES TOXICITY COME FROM?

Toxicity is a complex phenomenon and plays a role in the ongoing bad reputation of the gaming industry. Trolling is a key part of understanding where toxicity comes from. This ‘internet slang’ is a way of posting insincere, inflammatory, or off-topic content to an online platform. A modern practice that is common everywhere on the internet and gaming is no exception. It is defined as a deliberate act of upsetting or starting an argument with someone by using intentionally provocative language or behaviors. The reason those behaviors still happen today, despite the damage it causes to the industry and its community can be explained by the reproduction of those behaviors by many players with the feeling of immunity or without understanding the impact of their words on others. However what would seem harmless to some could be perceived as hurtful and violent to others, more vulnerable or younger players.

Today those disruptive behaviors take multiple forms, including insults, trash-talk but also non-verbal forms such as anti-game or griefing (not playing the game the way it has been designed, preventing other players from enjoying their experience), and even cheating is sometimes used with malevolent intents.

FOR MANY YEARS THE BELIEF WAS…

That if one can see that a player is being toxic or cheating, the punishment was in order. This negative way to deal with these types of players has been acknowledged as not doing the proper job and not getting the proper results, for example: if a player gets their account banned they can simply create another one, and because of the treatment that we got was so impersonal and negative we can be almost sure that they will do the same things again.

In fact, of all the players that we monitor at Anybrain, around 49,61% of them are repeat offenders (players that were banned and then returned and did the same).

These are some examples of what a negative approach to poor conduct can do (or not do). But what if we had another way to do things, can the studios and the security teams be more positive towards this matter?

For example, if we look at the cheating in video games problem… wouldn’t it be a good thing to instead of banning the players, give them a warning, tell them that the studio is aware of their cheating and ask for them to stop, wouldn’t that be more efficient than just simply ban the player? There are tools now to monitor fraudulent behaviors in real-time, as well as changes in behaviors when they do occur, for example, from all of the players that Anybrain has flagged and then our partners warned instead of banning them, 77% of them stopped with any malicious behavior…

HOW CAN WE DRIVE POSITIVITY?

Despite the industry suffering from a negative reputation, positivity is predominant in games. During the first half of 2022, Bodyguard.ai analyzed twice as many positive messages as negative messages. We do believe that a change of mindset among the players and the industry’s actors is needed to encourage and drive positivity in games and to do so, we need to collaboratively work towards three objectives:

• Moderating proactively: Bodyguard’s philosophy has always been to stop harmful content before it reaches the target and to protect people’s mental health, experience, and passion for the games.
• Showing positivity: allows the developers and community managers to focus on positive and meaningful interactions with their community. Bodyguard provides a moderation solution while highlighting the best of the communities.
• Empowering the users: at Bodyguard we value transparency and we want our users to access as much data as possible. With information on the drivers of negativity, they can plan ahead of their communication and mitigate any « bad buzz » or « shitstorm ».

The gaming community has all the potential to be a safe and secure space. Both the solutions developed by Anybrain and Bodyguard are built on the thinking “By gamers for gamers”. We want to build a safe and secure space for everyone and we have learned from the past industry’s mistakes and today we do things differently. Driving positivity to the videogame world can only come with one result, a world more and more positive for everyone, where gamers will thrive and will like to play their favorite games even more!