There’s been a lot of discussion about how to prevent toxic behavior in players of online competitive games. Today I’d like to suggest a different approach.
Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour?
Scientists are helping to stop antisocial behaviour in the world's most popular online game. The next stop could be a kinder Internet.
Play nice! How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour
Online abuse can be cruel – but for some tech companies it is an existential threat. Can giants such as Facebook use behavioural psychology and persuasive design to tame the trolls?
Anatomy of an internet argument
Social media isn't toxic, most people just haven't figured out the game (yet)
Riot uses LoL chatlogs to weed out toxic employees
Riot has used the behaviour of its employees when playing League of Legends to identify potential problems in the workp…
Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity
A negative-sum game: Policing Counter-Strike: GO cheaters with Overwatch
In battling cheaters, Valve crowdsources the judge, jury, and executioner.
Index
OpenSkill: Multiplayer Rating System. No Friction. In the multifaceted world of online gaming, an accurate multiplayer rating system plays a crucial role. A multiplayer rating system measures and c...
How League of Legends could make the internet a better place
An online game could just be the start of a happier, healthier online community
Exploitative Game Design: Beyond the F2P Debate
The past few months have seen a torrent of articles about Free-to-Play business models, often discussed alongside issues of ethics in games (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). These pieces have addressed the effect on addiction-prone players or children, the possibility of corrupting artistic intent, the sheer amount of money being spent, and other advantages and dangers of F2P. While all of this is relevant, I fear that we’re focusing too much on F2P and glossing over the wider ethical issues in game design.
Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour
Gender inequality and sexist behaviour is prevalent in almost all workplaces and rampant in online environments. Although there is much research dedicated to understanding sexist behaviour, we have almost no insight into what triggers this behaviour and the individuals that initiate it. Although social constructionist theory argues that sexism is a response towards women entering a male dominated arena, this perspective doesn’t explain why only a subset of males behave in this way. We argue that a clearer understanding of sexist behaviour can be gained through an evolutionary perspective that considers evolved differences in intra-sexual competition. We hypothesised that female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy incites hostile behaviour from poor performing males who stand to lose the most status. To test this hypothesis, we used an online first-person shooter video game that removes signals of dominance but provides information on gender, individual performance, and skill. We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly. In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance. We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena. Higher-skilled players, in contrast, were more positive towards a female relative to a male teammate. As higher-skilled players have less to fear from hierarchical reorganization, we argue that these males behave more positively in an attempt to support and garner a female player’s attention. Our results provide the clearest picture of inter-sexual competition to date, highlighting the importance of considering an evolutionary perspective when exploring the factors that affect male hostility towards women.
The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms
We consider the problems of societal norms for cooperation and reputation when it is possible to obtain cheap pseudonyms, something that is becoming quite common in a wide variety of interactions on the Internet. This introduces opportunities to misbehave without paying reputational consequences. A large degree of cooperation can still emerge, through a convention in which newcomers “pay their dues” by accepting poor treatment from players who have established positive reputations. One might hope for an open society where newcomers are treated well, but there is an inherent social cost in making the spread of reputations optional. We prove that no equilibrium can sustain significantly more cooperation than the dues‐paying equilibrium in a repeated random matching game with a large number of players in which players have finite lives and the ability to change their identities, and there is a small but nonvanishing probability of mistakes. Although one could remove the inefficiency of mistreating newcomers by disallowing anonymity, this is not practical or desirable in a wide variety of transactions. We discuss the use of entry fees, which permits newcomers to be trusted but excludes some players with low payoffs, thus introducing a different inefficiency. We also discuss the use of free but unreplaceable pseudonyms, and describe a mechanism that implements them using standard encryption techniques, which could be practically implemented in electronic transactions.
The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms
We consider the problems of societal norms for cooperation and reputation when it is possible to obtain cheap pseudonyms, something that is becoming quite common in a wide variety of interactions on the Internet. This introduces opportunities to misbehave without paying reputational consequences. A large degree of cooperation can still emerge, through a convention in which newcomers “pay their dues” by accepting poor treatment from players who have established positive reputations. One might hope for an open society where newcomers are treated well, but there is an inherent social cost in making the spread of reputations optional. We prove that no equilibrium can sustain significantly more cooperation than the dues‐paying equilibrium in a repeated random matching game with a large number of players in which players have finite lives and the ability to change their identities, and there is a small but nonvanishing probability of mistakes. Although one could remove the inefficiency of mistreating newcomers by disallowing anonymity, this is not practical or desirable in a wide variety of transactions. We discuss the use of entry fees, which permits newcomers to be trusted but excludes some players with low payoffs, thus introducing a different inefficiency. We also discuss the use of free but unreplaceable pseudonyms, and describe a mechanism that implements them using standard encryption techniques, which could be practically implemented in electronic transactions.
Lisa Nakamura: The internet is a trash fire. Here's how to fix it.
Life on the internet is real life, and we need to stop pretending that what happens online doesn't matter, says digital media researcher Lisa Nakamura. In this timely talk, she explains the steps we can take to correct the toxic behaviors that have become common online -- and help make the internet a place where we all feel safe.
Temporarily Offline
A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.
Moderating With Humans, For Humans - Trust Issues
As atproto matures, adversarial actors will reveal all the places where trust is implicit rather than managed - maybe time to build reputation mechanisms for PDSs like we do for email servers? It'll likely need to be default-block/prove-healthy, or default throttle until proven typical?
Scoiattolo
They've got a huge network that I'm in the process of graphing. They're now setting up their own PDSes. It's sophisticated.
