I was having a conversation with a friend about how the “Booyah!” preset message in Splatoon 2 is really fun and positive and encouraging. You press the down button and your little squidkid makes a cute noise and gives a fist-pump. Cheer your squid friends on~
This got me thinking about how other preset messages in other multiplayer games are often misused to be a bit snarky. In Overwatch the “Hello” message is accompanied by a first person wave animation and because of this animation a friendly hello can turn into a “You got owned bye bye” kind of thing
like so.
Hearthstone is pretty notorious for having lots of this kind of thing too. The “Well Played” message is often used sarcastically or as a “fuck you” to the other person. Even when the words are predetermined and seem innocent people sometimes still find a way to use them as something negative or snarky.
Only very, very recently did I realise that rapid crouching by a downed opponent in fighting games is actually tea-bagging and not some kind of tactic to mask whether you’re going high or low on their wakeup
some time ago, someone posted a picture from splatoon where a player was apologizing for being a teen and not measuring up to whatever people seem to expect in the game, and that made me think a lot about the environment that kids do play in today.
op post made me remember this again, and i thought about how you could prevent these things from happening, i. e. how can a gesture in a game be designed that it doesn’t fit in an ironic context?
kinda felt like i should look at katamari for an inspirstion, but the second game was tonally basically hating on the player, so that might not be such a good idea.
the only online multiplayer game i’ve ever really played a lot of was castlevania: harmony of despair, and people in that game used the 8 preset phrases in that to do very simple rudimentary roleplaying. just things like opening doors for each other and saying like “i’ll do it!” “thank you!” and so on. it was nice.
In Dissidia NT every character has a couple dozen voiced chat lines you can say before, during, and after a match. Two thirds are greetings, farewells, or battle related while the last third are extra lines from the characters’ respective games. But the localization of the first two thirds of lines are very flowery and do a better job at evoking characters’ personalities rather than be useful mid-match and it allows them to be used in a lot more contexts, so players have taken to having conversations through their voiced chat messages. It doesn’t look like I’ve been saving my more interesting conversations but I did manage to find at least one exchange within my saved videos.
people love on Well? What is it? but the gesture in DS2 where you point at someone and then make a decapitation gesture is the obvious best in series
Also in 3/Bloodborne or any game where you can /sit essentially (Dragon Quest 9 is another one) i like sitting down before i get up to use the bathroom or do something afk for a moment
back in the day I used to play smash melee with my friends all the time, like everyone else in the world, and anytime any of us got a kill we’d taunt, without fail, just as a thing. we all went to a tournament one time. I smashed the shit out of the first dude I played, and after every kill I taunted him just out of habit, as a reflex. I didn’t even notice that I was doing it until the set was over and then I felt real bad and had to apologize
now I’m just a toxic moba player who tells everyone that they’re shit
I was thinking a lot about how to design a gesture so that it couldn’t be used sarcastically or rudely too. I really like “Booyah!” because there’s only really one way to read the word and the enemy team doesn’t see when you do it so you cant use it to dunk on them.
Little emoji things like in RO are usually pretty nice but you still have to be careful even when you aren’t using words, can still read lil pictures in all kinds of ways
Yeah, pretty much any kind of gesture or phrase can be made rude by context. One strategy might be to enforce a moment of silence whenever a situation arises that could lead to mean speech. Like, when a player dies everyone has to shut up for 10 seconds, or something like that?
Overwatch had an interesting approach to censoring hate speech, insulting words and phrases, and bad sportsmanship - the chat dynamically replaces it with embarrassing phrases. For example, if someone says “gg ez”, one of the automatic phrases it’ll replace it with is “I’m wrestling with some insecurity issues in my life but thank you all for playing with me.” I kind of like that as a way of subverting toxic gaming culture.
