{"id":87738,"date":"2016-04-08T12:30:47","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T10:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=87738"},"modified":"2016-04-08T12:33:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T10:33:45","slug":"could-games-be-less-toxic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/features\/87738-could-games-be-less-toxic","title":{"rendered":"Online games are toxic and this is how we could fix them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world’s most popular game, League of Legends, is now scientifically testing new features in order to curb player toxicity.<\/p>\n

The MOBA – which boasts over 67 million players – faces a major issue, as a steep learning curve combined with an impatient community has led to thousands of gamers turning away, citing the community as “too toxic”.<\/p>\n

Riot Games responded to the issue by hiring a team of researchers in order to gather behavioral data on its user base and perform various social experiments.<\/p>\n

Jefrrey Lin, Lead designer of social systems at Riot, spoke to nature.com<\/a> about his team’s social engineering in making user experiences less toxic:<\/p>\n

Common wisdom holds that the bulk of the cruelty on the Internet comes from a sliver of its inhabitants \u2014 the trolls. Indeed, Lin’s team found that only about 1% of players were consistently toxic. But it turned out that these trolls produced only about 5% of the toxicity in League of Legends<\/i>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe vast majority was from the average person just having a bad day,\u201d says Lin. They behaved well for the most part, but lashed out on rare occasions.<\/p>\n

That meant that even if Riot banned all the most toxic players, it might not have a big impact. To reduce the bad behaviour that most players experienced, the company would have to change how players act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In late 2012 Lin began “mass priming” players – displaying images or messages that could change player behaviour from better to worse, or vice versa.<\/p>\n

These included tooltips encouraging constructive feedback, changing colour schemes and the introduction of “reform cards” which explained to banned players the exact reasoning behind their punishment.<\/p>\n

\"SANTA<\/p>\n

Since that system was switched on, Lin says, verbal toxicity among so-called ranked games, which are the most competitive \u2014 and most vitriolic \u2014 dropped by 40%. Globally the occurrence of hate speech, sexism, racism, death threats and other types of extreme abuse is down to 2% of all games.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reports<\/a> would indicate that Riot are not the only developers performing these kinds of experiments, only that they are the most public given League of Legends’ enormous player base.<\/p>\n

As it stands, you could be playing an online game right now with various cues engineered into the experience trying to make you a less toxic person.<\/p>\n

More gaming news<\/h3>\n

2016 Call of Duty will be a sci-fi shooter: report<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Far Cry Primal set to get a survival mode<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Final Fantasy film announced \u2013 Kingsglaive<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world’s most popular game is now scientifically testing new features in order to curb player toxicity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":87742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[637,17678,1860,17680],"class_list":["post-87738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-dota","tag-leage-of-legends","tag-online-gaming","tag-toxic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}