Preventing the Erosion of Gaming Culture: Why videogame developers must lead the charge in fighting their own communities’ toxicity.
(This was originally written for a, mercifully, unpublished student newspaper. So I swear I’m not talking down to you..... I promise. But I feel when I wrote those a few months back I raised some important points worth discussing, and with just how toxic the Anthem discourse and the Steam BS has gottten I felt it was worth re-posting).
The competitive videogame community has a problem, its one that simmers quietly under the surface, only to boil over with a disappointing regularity and ferocity: Toxicity.
Toxicity you ask? In the words of an anonymous Reddit user, ‘a toxic player is someone who constantly creates a bad atmosphere which interferes with your gaming experience’. In theory it’s someone who goes out of their way to make your experience fundamentally worse, however, in practice load up any competitive game; preform in such a way as to displease a team member and you’ll soon find a fellow ‘gamer’ willing to explain to you in great detail where you should take yourself and who/what/when/how you should do there.
Why does this happen? Has it always been like this? What damage does it do and what can we do about it?
There is no shortage of theories as to how certain games’ community have found themselves in this sorry state. Some of the most prevalent include:
Growing pains of a once enthusiast hobby becoming mainstream.
Gaming was once considered a niche and strange hobby for a particular stereotype: young, stay at home, social vagrant teens and young men yet to grow up, through the 80s and early 90s. From the mid-90s through the 00s the media shifted from presenting the stereotype of harmless young people in a phase using cutting edge technology for fun to reclusive and obsessional, underdeveloped men obstinate towards change. Naturally, this led to two mindsets among people who’ve been playing for years; wishing others never feel marginalised for something as menial as a hobby, seeking to make their favourite art form more inclusive, and open and those who due to this mild social stigma have garnered an, arguably, unfounded sense of entitlement and….
Protectiveness.
One of the key argument for those that act in toxic ways is, ‘games have always been competitive, like this, it’s part of them’, calling back to the days of simple competitive area based shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, where everyone had the same equipment and winning was purely decided by who had to best aim and most skill, fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, which were home to some of the first competitive international tournaments. The stereotypes inflicted on these communities oft resulted in mass gatekeeping, against those whom didn’t conform to clichés that they once rejected, and an aggressive competitive scene. Those that felt they’d been boxed in, wished to cut themselves off from further ridicule. This paired with the sense ownership and the what for the safety of an unchanging culture has resulted in a part of the gaming community which despite now being in a minority in their beliefs (that gaming’s culture should be preserved as it was before it found its way into the wider zeitgeist. Back when they were a minority not for their attitude but for holding this interest to begin with). Time has only made them more vocal, intrusive and dangerous against those that seek to expand gaming’s horizons.
What effect has this sentiment had on the wider gaming community?
In short: a culture where harassment, death threats and abuse are considered part-in-parcel with being a vocal or prominent game developer, journalist, or content creator. Typical examples including: campaigns to get vocal progressive, female game developers/creators/etc. fired using mob tactics and slander, death threats to developers for having the gall to delay a game or change a mechanics or statistics within a game and most insidiously a ‘git gud’ (or get out) attitude being built among many competitive games. This mentality isn’t just seen in the toxicity of some competitive games’ communities but in the rejection of robust accessibility options for lower skilled or impaired people as ‘diluting the experience’ and ‘taking away from the achievement of beating certain games’.
Here we see a split in the wider gaming community, wherein many who push for inclusivity, diversity and acceptance are forced to hold a constant defensive position against an aggressive minority which feels that what was once a stalwart constant in their life is being co-opted by a group wishing to push agendas.
In reality games have always been a progressive movement where creators often sought to push back against the cultural mandate, expectations and norms of art. In the days of games like DOOM, Wolfenstein and even the arcade experience, this took several forms. Games pushed the envelope in terms of what was considered acceptable violence, the amount of time you’d have to invest to gain an appreciation for the art you were looking at and communities based solely on competition. These aspects have become common place in mediums such as film; with violence everywhere in summer blockbuster, franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe having so many entries we order their importance to an overarching narrative and more sports viewed on television than ever before respectively. However now this same ethos of pushing the norms of entertainment sees creators strive for representation of traditionally underserved groups (diverse characters) and inclusivity for those with limited access to other forms of entertainment (accessibility options for those with a disability).
This constant pushing of boundaries was prophetic before and will be again as we slowly see films regard diversity as a more normalised reality rather than an exception, yet often a hostile minority resists this progressive approach.
So, how should the gaming industry tackle this issue? It must be creator led. Extremely popular games such as the completive shooter Rainbow Six: Siege have gone from having a reputation for their unwelcoming community to being widely regarded as holding one of the best moderated and diverse ones, how?
It was surprisingly simple, yet risky. The Developers Ubisoft Montreal, loved their community but hated the small abusive section which had grown to the point that it would be difficult to play the game for extended periods of time without encountering one of these players. In response the Ubisoft, with a player base of 35 million, risked alienating a sizable section of their audience. Claiming toxic ‘trash talking’ was an integral part of the game’s experience, Ubisoft chose to instantly ban anyone who used a racial/homophobic/etc. slurs in the game’s in-game chat or was recorded over voice chat, including retroactively banning players previously reported and gone unpunished. Did they lose their base due to the loss of a ‘integral part of the community’? No, in fact the games are currently growing at a faster rate than ever before.
All the while companies like Sony push robust accessibility options for disabled gamers in their first party games and Microsoft-Xbox released an Adaptive Controller: a modifiable, cheap alternative controller for those with a disability. Resulting in a player base which now has more varied discussions, centred on more positive elements of gaming, as they simply can play more games than before. On top of all this, in the long run this has created more business for the creators by tapping into long neglected markets and creating goodwill for themselves with the majority of those that discuss games.
All this being said there is still a massive upwards battle and leading from the front is easier said than done. With some competitive games struggling to curb undesirable sections of their community in spite of the developers’ best efforts, see games like Overwatch and Battlefield mixed to failed implementation of teammate reward/punishment mechanics.
While some game developers do push for a diversity the likes of which have never been seen in another industry before. Other industry leaders like League of Legends developer, Riot, and Quantic Dream, studio home to overrated (very personal opinion) auteur David Cage, have been reported to ostensibly be boys’ clubs. Too often you’ll read reports of managers and company-higher-ups acting as catalysts for their community’s most negative members, condoning and even encouraging gatekeeping and bigotry in their own company. With reports from ex-Riot employees saying that if employees weren’t seen as ‘real gamers’, they were told they should get out and two riot employees, one former, on current, bring a federal case against the company for discrimination on the bases of sex, while David Cage’s studio has been caught with racist emails circulating among staff and Cage himself happy hanging a ‘penis painting’ in his office, with reckless abandon and zero sense of irony.
It’s an uphill battle. What can we do as community members and outsiders? We encourage developers to and celebrate when they do take positive steps. Whether that means taking a minute to thank Naughty Dog on Twitter for making the protagonist of the much anticipated upcoming The Last of Us: Part II a queer woman or Insomniac for including a rainbow flags on buildings around Manhattan in Marvel’s Spider-man, which they also loaded with options regarding granular difficultly and accessibility settings for players of all abilities. We must also, respectfully, be vocal when developers with resources and opportunities don’t make their games a better place for more players, telling them why, on mass, how it would affect us to be included or supported while playing games, explaining how this can inevitably only be a net positive for them in the long run. Ask developers like iD to fix their colour-blind options in their games, tell Rockstar you’re tired of playing as the same grizzled male architype, with unforgiving controller options and beg Nintendo to include Waluigi in more games (I love him, don’t shame me).
Games can only be made a better place by those making them, however, it’s our responsibly as consumers and players to vote with our wallets and be heard in our discourse to act as their supporters and critics, in the fight against toxicity.
Again I originally wrote this partially as an explain-er for people who might not know loads about games so I’d really appreciate any and all feedback and remember if you know someone saying shitty things in real life, call them out on it, you owe to yourself to ask for answers in person because someone online will rarely try to justify themselves!
Log in to comment