Preventing toxicity and serious issues: 3 popular game types GGWP can help moderate

It’s no secret that playing the latest big online shooter can lead to toxic interactions with your opponents and, in some cases, even your teammates. You might hop online to unwind for a couple of hours before bed, but it could very well have the opposite effect thanks to one or multiple bad actors you encounter. You could have 10 straight matches with nothing but pleasant matchmaking, but all it takes is one toxic player to raise your blood pressure, and suddenly your relaxing gaming session has turned into the most stressful part of your day.

We’re sure you’ve had this scenario or something approximating it play out in your own living room; whether you’re gaming or just scrolling social media, rotten behavior from others can ruin an otherwise pleasant online experience. Shooters often get the worst reputation in this regard, likely thanks to the fact that the competition is fast-paced and built around aggression, but it’s far from the only gaming category that suffers from toxicity in its community.

Here are three types of games we’ve identified and their toxicity problems.

Competitive Games

This one is a bit obvious since competition can sometimes bring out all of our most aggressive tendencies, but it extends beyond spawn-killers in shooters hoping to gain an edge. It comes from all angles, whether in text, voice, or even in-game behavior. Your team can berate you for not carrying out the game plan they envisioned or being unable to play up to their standard, while we all know how infuriating it can be to have vitriol come your way from those you’re playing against. Whether it’s a MOBA or a fighting game, a shooter or a battle royale, there are so many opportunities for players to interact with one another, and when it’s PvP, you never know what kinds of communications you’ll receive in a matchmaking lobby. Even sports games can sometimes combine competitiveness with team/city pride to quickly escalate from friendly trash talk to outright toxicity. 

Competitive fervor is one thing; in fact, our tools know to be lenient when folks are just engaging in friendly banter among friends. But when that excitement and competitiveness turn to anger and vitriol towards strangers, it can ruin anyone’s good time. And when that escalates further to something completely unacceptable like identity hate, it’s important to not let that poison a game’s community. Toxicity and hate can quickly erode a community from within, and action is important. But what about players who are positive forces within the community? At GGWP, our platform can not only moderate and take action against hate, toxicity, and abuse, but it can also highlight prosocial players within your community and reward them for contributing to the good experiences that most players seek out when they head online for a gaming session.

Free-to-Play and Mobile Family Games

Free-to-play games have changed the face of the games industry over the last decade and a half, offering players the lowest possible cost of entry. Unfortunately, this means bad actors can come in and cause chaos without monetary investment. If someone picks up the latest premium online game with the intent of making the experience miserable for everyone else, they can be banned, which results in them losing the money they initially paid. With free-to-play titles, someone can download a game and jump in with no barrier, opening the floodgates for those with nothing to lose. Mobile titles, which are among the most widely played games due to the massive install-base, are particularly difficult to moderate. Thanks to wide device ownership, incentives to log in daily, and mechanics that sometimes rely on players to communicate with guilds or clans made up of strangers bring additional challenges to this already tricky category. 

This can go from unpleasant to downright scary when you consider many of these free-to-play titles are designed for a younger audience, which means the threat is more than just curse words. And when it’s common practice in some families for children to be left unsupervised with a tablet, a well-meaning mobile game can turn into fertile grounds for child predators. Predatory behavior must be monitored when children are one of the target audiences. Because many younger players also use these games as a means of social interaction, it adds extra layers of necessary monitoring and moderation. GGWP’s tools allow for vigilant monitoring of unacceptable predatory behavior, including complex interactions over longer periods of time that can lead to grooming, flagging to moderators users that may be exhibiting alarming behaviors. When the barrier to entry is as low as it is for many free-to-play and mobile titles, developers and any moderation tools and tactics they utilize must have a staunch and strict zero-tolerance policy on these behaviors to which these game types are especially sensitive. GGWP takes these concerns and challenges extremely seriously and surfaces issues like minor grooming so that it can be addressed with urgency.

Social and VR Games

Most online games offer communication of some sort, but what about titles where that is a core mechanic? Social deduction games have existed for decades, but their popularity exploded during the pandemic as gamers sought new ways to enjoy games with friends while being physically apart. These titles allow friends and strangers alike to come together and work through in-game problems using voice and text chat. This is an incredible opportunity to connect in ways that other games can’t offer, but if games with communication just on the side of the main experience open the doors to toxicity, titles where it’s the mechanic upon which the rest of the experience is built amplify the potential problems caused by said communication. And just as people seem to sometimes forget that another human is on the other side of the screen when they’re making mean comments, that can increase when the game is as immersive as virtual reality titles can be.

With games such as these, moderator efforts should be focused on player-level management as a 360-degree view of player behaviors over an extended period. GGWP’s tools not only take into account the makeup of the players in the match to allow for more flexibility when users are playing with friends, but it also tracks a person’s interactions over time. We use models to ensure that those who demonstrate a pattern of toxicity are the ones acted upon. GGWP’s platform takes into account the context of both voice and text in the wide view of their time as a player to reduce the risks of false positives and wrongful sanctions.

At GGWP, we understand that content moderation is difficult, so we have worked tirelessly to develop tools to aid in delivering the best experience to the user. We aim to minimize the friction between the experience creators designed and the experience the end-user actually receives. By utilizing automated tools that not only filter out the obvious infractions like hate speech and obscene words but also flag more nuanced interactions like potential predatory behavior, GGWP offers a sophisticated suite of moderation options and tools to help your team build or maintain the excellent community they deserve.

But we also understand that trash talk can be a fun part of the experience when you’re playing with a group of friends, so we have rulesets in place that analyze who is in your session, and if it’s a large group of friends you opted to play with, our tools will be more relaxed in their moderation. Conversely, if you’re in a large group and our tools pick up that you’re ganging up on a solo player in a match, our tools might be quick to intervene. Context is important, and we’ve instilled that in the AI that powers our tools.

GGWP’s mission is to make it so that something as nuanced and difficult as content moderation is as seamless as possible. When players can jump into their favorite game and not have to worry about being upset about anything more serious than the results of a match, they’re way more likely to not only return to the experience but also bring friends. You’ve already put in so much work to bring your game to life, let GGWP pick up the assist.