If you like to be an ass to your fellow gamers online your days may be numbered. Instead of dealing with single online game publishers when you act up, you may soon find yourself face to face with a ban hammer wielded by a conglomerate of global developers, publishers and streamers. Riot Games, Blizzard and Twitch, have announced that together they are partnering up to try and fight toxicity in games to make online play more fun for everyone.
Their new super team is known as the Fair Play Alliance and although those three companies are the tier one fighters, like the Avengers, there's a lot of additional characters waiting in the wings. 30 companies in total have announced their cooperation, including Epic Games and CCP, all of whom will share research and methods for combating toxic play with one another.
At the very least, the idea is to set a standard of gameplay behaviour among all companies, so that no matter where gamers go, they have to meet a certain level of fairness and decorum. Alongside that though, the company will also be looking at the reasons toxic play happens in the first place and will take measure to try and stamp it out.
"A lot of these challenges today are super intimidating," Riot senior technical designer Kimberly Voll told Kotaku. "These are big cultural shifts. As an industry and as a society online, we’re trying to find our way. Having to be a company that steps out and says ‘We’re gonna be the ones to do this’ is kinda scary. This is an opportunity for all of us to say ‘What if we walked together as an industry?’"
A major component of this will be in working together to see if the kinds of games these companies make, actually make players into assholes. Competitive play is by its nature quite sociopathic, but, does it really need to be the case that we hate our opponents for winning, or our teammates when they let us down? If games were made differently, could we fix that problem?
"There are a lot of challenges when you’re trying to determine what good behavior looks like—or at least what bad looks like—on a global scale," Voll said. Indeed, how do you determine when friends are insulting each other in a fun way, versus when newly acquainted players are being legitimately nasty to one another?
Still, the Fair Play Alliance will take a good stab at it. What do you think they could do to try and stop online toxic play?
