I play games online. A lot. So after enough time I start to see trends, as well as being drawn towards certain aspects of the multiplayer experience.
One Size Does Not Fit All
If you play a lot of online games then what I’m about to tell you will be a no-brainer. Those that don’t, or don’t play many video games at all may not see this as clearly. The experience you get from playing online, with random strangers across the country/world differs from one game to another. Even more so it differs across game genres. This isn’t just to do with gameplay experience, but the situation around interacting with those strangers.
Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes they’re hostile. The only general net you can cast around people you will meet online is that you have no idea what type of person they will be. This may sound negative, but it can have a silver lining. Strangers can be kind, and that person you were randomly matched with may have a personality that matches yours. That person on the other team? He may be your best friend if you ever sat down to talk with him.
Toxicity
Unfortunately given the sudo-anonymity of The Internet many people who are otherwise well spoken can become quite rude. If they know they won’t be punished for it very severely then a lot of people have no problem with taking out every problem in their life on the random stranger on their team. This leads to a sort of acidity in that game, and online in general.
Game genres have different ways of handling this toxicity and you will notice this being affected by players and the game itself. MOBA games come to mind for being the most toxic playground. It is no secret that DoTA, LoL, HoN, so on and so forth have some of the worst communities. The developers have tried to punish this by allowing you to report these players that misbehave. Unfortunately the scale and sheer number of reports means that this system has to be automated, and any automated system is hard to be perfect.
The flaw in reporting is that it doesn’t fix the issue for you at that time. Reporting a player doesn’t mute them, that’s seperate. Unfortunately you can’t mute their actions, and they may take out their aggressions in a non-verbal way in-game. Feeding or allowing the enemy to kill them gives the enemy team an advantage that snowballs into you losing the game because your teammate doesn’t like you.
Teamwork
The way most players avoid this is to only play with a group of their friends. If you know the person, or you know you get along, then you can form a pool of people to play with and never have to risk getting a person having a bad day. Unfortunately this means that unless you want to witness verbal abuse then you have to play with friends. If you have nobody to play with then you don’t get to play the game, or you have to play a much worse version of it.
I don’t have a lot of people to play with, and the people I do have lives and families and full time jobs that mean that the windows of us being able to play together can get pretty slim. These 30–60 minute MOBA games just can’t happen in this window, so I have taken to never playing such games. Save for one.
The game Smite by Hi-Rez Studios has, in my opinion, one of the best communities in the realm of MOBAs. I play it on the Xbox One but it is also available on PC. Smite doesn’t try to take itself too seriously, which means that the hardcore must-win people that will get angry if you’re anything less than a god at the game (pun intended) will frequent Smite less. The time window issue is still hard, but the problem of feeding I have run into very very rarely.
Narcissism
There is a bit of a catch-22 here. This toxicity comes about as a result of a game requiring teamwork. On paper this seems amazing, throw a challenge at a group of players and gauge them on their ability to work together as a team. This challenge sounds as old as time, and yet it is the source of players acting like this. You can’t remove this, because then the groups of friends playing together won’t have as much fun. Working with a team that wants to work as a team is amazing.
Unfortunately, working with a team that includes people that want to be the king of the world is not amazing. The desire to win is in all of us, I think we’re born with it. I know I have it. It is part of the origin of this poor attitude. If someone gets it into their head that you are the reason they are losing then their drive to win wants to blame and hate you. It’s easier to point fingers over The Internet, after all.
Non-MOBAs
Other games have some level of these players in them. It’s impossible to remove alltogether. The FPS genre has its fair share of toxic players, but I think it happens less as the matches are shorter. It’s slightly harder for your teammates to directly harm your gameplay in this genre.
MMORPGs have some of the best communities of all the genres. As it’s closer to a simulated world than a game then you can take the same solution to avoiding terrible people that you would in real life. Just go away from them. Be it walk, fly, slither, join a different server, play on a different character, or what have you. This can be somewhat negated when the games have grouping systems for parties to run some sort of dungeon or event. Then we may run into the same problems as before, but just as often the system will have a vote-kick ability to remove these people.
Anti-Toxicity Design Descisions
To combat this reason to not play games online, developers will try to implement in-game functionality to offset it. This can be the ability to mute one or more players microphones. Perhaps there is a simple report button as mentioned earlier to make the creators aware of this player’s attitude. There are penalties of leaving early when it hurts your team, and in the same light FPS games sometimes kick you out if it thinks you’re trying to hurt your team by shooting them.
Unfortunately as well as these things work, they can also back-fire. I’ll give an example. I was playing a first person shooter yesterday. I was operating a powerful vehicle on the map, and it can have a passenger. Someone jumped in as the passenger and started trying to direct me towards a certain area. I of course being the driver went where I pleased. This random person disliked this so much that he made it his mission to try to get me kicked from the game. He could not do this directly, but after positioning himself in my line of fire enough times the game ‘thinks’ that I am trying to kill my team. I get kicked, penalized, and he gets to go on his merry way doing as he pleases.
This is the shining example of why I don’t enjoy playing games online. Running into these people ruins the experience for me.
Going Forward
What I dislike the most about playing games online is dealing with toxic players. The more a company can do to prevent poor attitudes in their games the better. I hope that in the future we can have design breakthroughs in this area. Every few months I hear about the stunning new graphical effects or wonderful design descisions from an upcoming game that I just have to buy.
What I want to hear about more than anything else is someone comming up with a new and clever way to prevent hostility online. It goes without saying that this is something I’d feel like investing in. I mentioned earlier that narcissism is some of the reason online games are terrible. I have no way to prove this, but I think if we had a game design that forces a player to humble themselves then this toxicity could vanish. If the player doesn’t ever think that someone else is the direct cause of their poor performance then they won’t lash out at people.
I have no data to prove this, it’s conjecture and theory that I’m spouting. Still, though, I think humbling people could serve the player, as well as those they play with.
