it’d be easier to engage with you if you like, elaborated
Is there any contrast between these and your League example? Running down mid to troll your team is exactly the same as scoring on yourself in Rocket League/Videoball.
I think there is theoretically a competitive game that could exist without trolling, but it has to be 1v1 no teams and the other side has to be able to surrender? But even then, there’s still a chance that some kind of stalling strategy exists and the player on the receiving end doesn’t know the game well enough to know if they should surrender or not.
Oooh, there’s also the opposite of that example: Playing out an obviously lost game without surrendering just to waste the winner’s time.
I know this happens in chess sometimes.
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I don’t think I did a great job of outlining this in that first post but I’m trying to treat toxicity as a more holistic and general phenomenon than single instances of trolling or griefing or harassment
answering your question really specifically: the contrast isn’t really in the act itself, it’s more about what everyone else loses when someone decides to start griefing in a particular game. if I score on myself in videoball or rocket league, it’s pretty easy to quit and the worst thing that can happen when you quit a game is a loss of rank, but both rocket league and videoball have a design where just the act of participating with the game objects themselves is supposed to be inherently fun. the reasons it’s more toxic to troll in league of legends are 1. from a pure time-spent perspective, it’s much much higher since you have to wait 10-15 minutes just to surrender in league, 2. the roles that league situates players in are so complex that if one of the 10 people playing doesn’t match up intent or skill-wise in a pretty narrow band, the whole game is thrown into chaos pretty much, and 3. (maybe the most important) it’s impossible to improve your own skill in any meaningful way without partaking in this super complex ritual
so with league of legends, the environment itself becomes toxic really quickly because it doesn’t even really require actual intent to ruin the game experience when perceived intent is often more than enough to get people pointing fingers at each other, and it’s all amplified by the sentiment of wasted time, whereas in rocket league sometimes you can make a fun challenge out of defending a 4v2 game when someone is trolling because you’re still taking something away from it. and even if you don’t take something away from it, it’s not a huge deal to just quit and find a different group
I think the reason I keep coming back to the magic circle when thinking about all of this is because the created space assumes an agreement by all participants to participate in good faith, and when a participant decides to leave that space, the structure of the ritual can be rearranged to fit the remaining participants. in physical spaces this makes a lot of intuitive sense - if we’re playing some sort of physical game and someone decides to leave the circle, whether that be a good faith voluntary “quitting” or a bad faith “cheating”, the way people think through that restructuring process is still fairly natural. but in a virtual game, it’s just much harder to ascertain what the best way to reform the circle would be. oftentimes the easiest way to solve that problem is just to leave and find a new space.
so toxicity as a phenomenon is (to me) a function of how easy it is to navigate this magic circle. the harder it is to restructure the circle because of a participant who has left, or the harder it is to find a new circle when you’ve deemed the existing one unworthy of participation, the easier it is for toxicity to just naturally arise, regardless of whether that manifests through text, voice, or game actions
that’s kind of why I feel like approaching toxicity from a framework of moderation on top of existing systems as opposed to creating a space that will inherently be non-toxic is a losing proposition
I probably have way too many words to say about this and I have a meeting in 10 minutes blah send tweet
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Are you proposing that games work on reshuffling when players drop? We’ve had experiments with AI bots that have never been satisfying. I think the problem again comes out of competitive expectations and social distance; your example of in-person games, I think, speaks to the social environment created more than the game structure. LAN parties were easy to deal with people coming and going; games were ad-hoc and loose, people could work out reshuffling teams for balance amongst themselves.
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hmm I think it’s trivially true that some games inspire more toxicity than others (mobas being the perfect example), but I’m not convinced that there’s much that can be done design-wise past a certain point.
Like, certain people are always going to hate some aspect of a game, whether it be a specific strategy or just losing. And in person you can stigmatize that behavior and shame them into playing nice, but online they can misbehave, fuck off, and never have to deal with that same group of people again.
yeah I’m finding as I’m typing all of this out that most of what I’m thinking about deals with the social structures around the games and whether they’re easy or difficult to work around and through
but I also feel like the design of a lot of games create social structures that have a very high time and effort cost and that lends itself to toxicity more often than not. and, kind of a tangent, but I think the framework of physicality and our proprioceptive empathies are really underrated aspects of how these social structures are formed. “unsportsmanlike conduct” is a much easier concept to understand intuitively when it involves physicality, and there’s a semantics problem with what undesired behavior is in a videogame where like, “the devs are letting me do it” is a legitimate response to a lot of potential critiques of player behavior in virtual social spaces
I guess it’s just like, I don’t understand why you would design what is essentially a cross between CS:GO and overwatch and not expect whatever toxic behaviors from both games to show up, and I also don’t understand why people think that better moderation on its own will do the trick as opposed to like, baking the moderation systems into the games themselves, which would mean things like different lobby systems and stuff like that
like, ARMS was a goddamn revelation as far as I was concerned when it came to how to design lobbies in a way that reduced toxicity - having that quick play shuffle mode with 8-12 players in a lobby shuffling around to different matches of different types, scoring players based on victories within the matches and limiting their in-lobby interactions to a “yay” or “argh” emote was wonderful. the shuffling aspect meant that people could experience different games, the lobby system allowed people to drop in or out at will, people could establish in-game relationships and rivalries that would last for as long as the lobby was active, and if you did get a griefer in your game it lasted all of 2 minutes? it’s a damn shame that the game wasn’t a bigger hit because that lobby system is one of my favorite things ever, which is…something I’m definitely saying about a lobby system in the year of our lord 2020
Oh, definitely. I think at this point It Is Known that League of Legends is almost purpose-built to breed toxicity. My read is that developers have been in a detente with this issue for years; resigned that it’s not made meaningful progress and they should focus first on making the game they want, and then running at that wall.
It’s interesting to think about the differences between the LAN party example I referenced, and board and card games, and physical games. I can’t pull a lot of examples of different player aggression and behavior; I can think of stereotypically masculine cycles in sports of aggression/physical bonding with fouling and backslapping behavior but I don’t know if that’s driven by culture or the physicality of it. I’d love to thoughts on that.
Personally, I’ve always been afraid of touching people in sports; I just can’t work around the fouling line or do defense in basketball at all, I’m too confused trying to find the nice and polite line. On the other hand, leaning into a character to be a real jerk in a tabletop game appeals to me; it feels like part of a performance that’s well-bounded.
I’d be happy if they could just stop people spamming the crouch button tbh
Sexualised gloating is very rude
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Has there been a game that heavily tutorialized good social practices? I remember people complaining about, uh, was it “Gran Turismo Sport”? Because it forced a lot of videos and tutorials just for playing online properly. Has anyone ever done the equivalent with socializing in a multiplayer game?
Slow drip feed of like, idk, emotes or whatever to teach people how to act as respectable human beings before allowing them the privilege of communicating with other human beings?
Cuz it seems like part of the problem is having “Skill Ranking” so totally divorced from your ability to healthily communicate (as opposed to just…communicate) and using that as a motivator. I mean maybe you can get punished if you’re reported & moderation is working hard, but why let people rank up at all if they’re making the experience worse overall?
Something like Rainbow Six: Siege for example, the more you’re able to communicate the better off you are, but you’re also not going to know what’s valuable to communicate until you’ve played for a while. So why not expand that by allowing greater communication tools when the player proves themselves able to use the basics effectively? Incorporating that mechanically by starting with just a ping and (after so many hours of successful usage) set statements they can choose from “Over here” “Need A Wall” and so on, and ending (maybe) with voice or text chat?
Seems like it would also be easier to moderate on a higher level too, if the players are slowly moved communication-privilege wise you can more easily sift through the troublemakers since they’ll be a smaller portion of the reports.
Unless things have changed since launch, you watch a 5 minute movie once and that was it. You could do license style challenges afterward like any Gran Turismo game, but they were not required to play online against other players. I don’t remember the exact wording used in game, but you effectively have two ranks: one for your actual race placements and the other for how much you adhere to clean driving rules. Both would be used during matchmaking so you would be up against players of similar civility levels. This is kinda wonky though because the game is not always the best at determining who is to blame for a collision and sometimes you get dinged for something that was unavoidable. This is only enforced in the main “esport” modes but it is disabled (don’t remember if it’s a lobby setting or global) in player lobbies.
There were a lot of complaints about GT Sport, mainly because it deviated from people’s wishes and expectations for a PS4 Gran Turismo, but I dont remember complaints about the civility system aside from what I already mentioned about misattributed blame.
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let me know what music you would like to hear in videoball so i can convert it to an .ogg for use in mods
Audio from a full episode of The Joy of Painting
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modded videoball is the future.
videoball now has
- custom maps
- custom announcers
- custom music
- custom decals
- individually adjustable music/announcer/sfx volumes
- bugfixes
and with local multiplayer played online over parsec, nearly all of the original issues with the game are a thing of the past now. come play videoball with us - join the videoball all-stars discord:
we have games multiple times a week, including tuesday night videoball which is a weekly scheduled event where we try to get as many players together for as long as possible
modding is still ongoing so if you have a request join the discord and tell us about it
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CRT-ball
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That sure is
I love that they’ve never done a steam sale discount. Fuck that whole rat race.