Systems still shape communication; twitter’s structure encourages/foregrounds different interactions than community forums, games with pickup groups, defined roles, and long session lengths like League of Legends have worse direct player harassment than short, inconsequential games, though Call of Duty has a different kind of awfulness.
Souls’ communication system almost puts it on a spectrum with Journey – a limited conversation system. There are examples of MMO trans-language keyboards that are working to facilitate similar communication, but they are intended for conversations and not twitter-esque broadcasts. For example, like twitter, Souls messages are: asynchronous content, subject to user review, able to be served to larger and larger audiences based on engagement metrics.
And the stilted vocabulary makes them subject to meme transmission, and like memes hateful ones bloom late but spread like weeds.
I don’t think this is directly comparable to the difficulties tech bros face when asking how to reform social media because unlike those platforms users don’t have an expectation of clear communication. Within the gamespace designers have much more freedom to constrain and attempt to shape behavior.
Happy medium: as ever, I think the best solution is to just clown on the people who leave these messages, i.e. by putting a From employee in charge of the “tit joke reaper (胸の冗談)” which they can, as a full time job, dispatch to attack the offending players and do real nasty shit like permanently break their equipment in the middle of boss fights
I mean, it’s basically men’s room graffiti, right? most of it is stupid and juvenile and we’d be better not having to read it but lamenting it as a thing in itself can come across as humourless compared with, well
also the kotaku editorship is much more willing to effect a position of “we want to do better” than … most people interested in videogames on the internet, and this piece puts that conflict in very clear relief
I mean, I thought it was funny at the small ratio I saw in Demon’s Souls. And broken metaphor-pidgin sex speak can be funny in small doses (yes, I laughed at Amazing Chest Ahead too). It’s gotten worse over time, though, and the impression shifts from cute graffiti to pervasive misogyny. I’m pretty sure they’ve gotten more violent over time, too, which is really gross.
I’d be all down for a scrubber job. Collect highly-downvoted messages and search for patterns. You could probably start finding explicit combinations people are parroting and mute those. And that’s how I’d handle it – let people write the message, but if it gets flagged just don’t serve it to others.
the men’s room vibe is one thing— not that i know why we’d shoot for that— but the real issue is that if you find an npc that’s a woman anywhere in any of these games you can be confident the area is littered with these messages
this is like, men’s room graffiti in a space that isn’t exclusively occupied by fucking men though. This is like if men also went into the women’s room and the gender neutral room and wrote the same vile shit about women
I’m less comfortable with that argument than @bib’s because I don’t think the gross shit is any more “for” men (like I said it’s just as often bog-standard homophobic) or any more OK on that basis
I guess you could change the language just enough to have the same context in-game but without the other connotations. Like, ‘Amazing Treasure chest ahead’ isn’t really funny if you put that in front of Gwynevere’s room. Also ‘chasm’ or ‘fall’ instead of hole, ‘although’ instead of but etc. Tongue never made sense, so they should just remove it.
The message system got more flexible in the later games, so it’s a bit hard to untangle the effect of that from the change in community. IIRC Demon’s had a very inflexible system with mostly fixed sentences that sometimes (not even always!) you could substitute a subphrase at one point. It was good enough and they probably should’ve kept it that way.
Journey illustrates that there’s a correlation between ‘less player expression’ and ‘less player ugliness’. I think there’s a fairly large space in between mute, unarmed(!) players and Demons’ system that may help shape this.
Hearthstone lets players communicate with exactly six innocuous phrases including “Greetings” and “Well played!”. I gather Blizzard learned from their RTS games that free-text communication in 1v1 games is unnecessary and toxic.
Yet, people still sometimes manage to come across as assholes when they use one of the Hearthstone emotes (for example, by spamming one of them repeatedly after making a winning move). At one point they decided to remove “I’m Sorry” and replace it with “Amazing!” because the former proved to never be used earnestly and to have bad vibes.
