Share your experiences building up safe and healthy game communities (Interviews)

What exactly is meant by safe and healthy here? Should we be telling the players not to overeat, get some exercise and sunshine and wear a biking helmet and for ghawdsakes don't run with scissors in your meathooks.?

 

I would recommend you watch these 2 videos:

In addition to that, something that I could witness myself in Insurgency compared to Insurgency:Sandstorm is that it makes a huge difference whether multiplayer games are "server based" compared to "matchmaking queue based". Playing together with a group of people for more than one game in a row was huge for encouraging cooperative behaviour and positive interactions between players. Servers that regulars tend to come back to create micro communities inside the bigger community and if there are at least a couple people on a server that know each other well enough to set a positive example for cooperative gameplay, that can inspire some of the randomly joined players to join in. In Insurgency: Sandstorm shortly after release, there were no "servers" with people playing, and in the matchmaking queue you'd never stay together with a group of people long enough. The community experience was much much worse imho, even though it was almost the same playerbase playing these two games.
I think there is a lot of merit to the theory of games shaping their communities through their mechanics.

 

Then why is the pokemon community like that?

 

I don't know a single thing about the pokemon community and never played one of the games. I think it's something about capturing wild animals/monsters and making them fight against each other for entertainment purposes, and letting them get stronger by relentlessly forcing them through countless duels and exploiting the weaknesses of the other monsters. Correct? And the catchphrase was something about obsessively wanting to capture one of each monster species? So what's their community like?
I believe there also was something about a mechanic where you trade pokemon with other players, maybe?

 

As a VR game and a ultra realistic one we mostly have adults in our discord. Sometimes discussion heats up but it's often civil

 

That's a rather glib interpretation that doesn't line up with the way the games present themselves and their systems.

 

That honestly doesn't answer a single thing he asked.

For example, I know what pokemon is, despite having never played a single game, but I genuinely have no idea what you meant when you said "pokemon community being like that".

"Like that"? Like what? Is "like that" a good thing or a bad thing? Weren't the pokemon games single player in the first place?

 

Pokemon is singleplayer the same way Call of Duty is singleplayer. The pokemon community is notoriously terrible and went on a months long campaign against the developers because the latest game didn't include all 898 pokemon.

 

Given that this is the first time I hear about it... not very notoriously.

Might have something to do with the games being available exclusively on Nintendo systems.

 

Just because you aren't aware of something in a game you didn't even know what multiplayer doesn't mean it's not a thing.

This is grasping at straws. If you want a good community it's more important to cultivate that community through interaction and outreach as well as laying down moderation guidelines. Making it so "the game doesn't encourage it" is silly because nobody can actually lay down what makes this happen in the game itself.

The argument that games control the community around them instead of it being a community management factor runs parallel to the same "videogames cause violence" argument, where the realities of the situation are ignored in favour of whatever requires the least effort possible and has "theoretical" viability. But it's never like that, and I've got an example.

World of Warcraft has been around for 17 years and one of their big problems became one of their roleplaying servers, Argent Dawn. On Argent Dawn, if you had a female character, if you walked into either of the main starting zone hubs, you would be bombarded with requests for erotic roleplay in your whispers. Often, these would be incredibly explicit. A lot of the them involved opening with a graphic depiction of sexual assault. If you wanted to level somewhere else, you'd have to walk all the way to another zone which, with the average speed of a WoW player, took about 15 minutes if you knew the fast route and 20-25 if you didn't.

How did they approach this?

The problems persisted for a couple weeks after the situation started to get wider attention from the other servers. Eventually Blizzard stepped in and dedicated more GMs (a core part of MMO and other online game community management) for the problem areas. On top of that, they started enforcing increasingly strict policies on what would and would not get you suspended or even banned from the game. The immediate effect of this? Unsolicited messages on Argent Dawn decreased dramatically.

What about World of Warcraft's game design, exactly, had people going feral over this?


Argent Dawn is still a mess, but it's a mess where one of the biggest problem, one that has been applied across a few more roleplaying servers to similar effect.

 

It's important to have as little moderation as possible. Evybody hate dumb moderation and moderation rules.

I think we have had to ask a maximum of 3 times to keep it civil in our discord and that's about it.

Other discords and forums have 50 different rules that har policed with a iron fist, not a customer friendly approach

 

Sorry, none at all.

VR is the kind of solution like making your game cost 200$. That too will shape the community in a certain way I bet.

Thanks for the info! Like I said, I don't know much about the game or the fandom. Watching detective Pikachu is the closest I've gotten to the franchise.

I didn't claim the game mechanics angle to be the only factor, and I think neither should one do the same for moderation as a solution. E.g. how would you propose to solve Call of Duty's toxicity through manual moderation alone?

I don't play Blizzard games much, haven't they made it so that they can ban you on their games for things you say on your private social media accounts or something like that? I vaguely remember there being some outrage about that.

Good points! I'm glad they got this under control.

I never touched MMOs or other hard drugs, so I can't speak from experience, but to try and answer your question anyway: the ability to "whisper" to strangers seems like a very problematic mechanic. The anonymity of WOW accounts likely has a big impact on player behaviour too (you might not consider that to be a game mechanic, but I think it's worth considering because it is an impactful part of the rules of play that shape the experience, especially on a roleplay focused server). I've seen a game implement a "personal bubble" feature that prevents people from getting close to you (they just vanish at close range), things like that combined with whitelisting mechanics and friendslists might help. Of course I do conceed, that a lot of changes that might "help", might harm the intended core gameplay experience.

The main reasons I'm suggesting to think about game mechanics shaping community behaviour here is that in general I think people here put too little thought into gamedesign aspects, and for many indies it will be more feasible to adjust the design of a game with a little foresight than to hire an army of moderators that monitor ingame interactions. But of course your mileage may vary!

 

One other thing...

Having a person controlling the character had people going feral.

"There's a person", "They might be of compatible sex", "You won't be punched in the face for bad behavior".

Now if you add to that a juvenile player, you can see where this is going to go.

Some very young people have been known going around social networks, boldly asking for intimate photos, sexual favors and so on.

Because it is hard to get punched in the face over TCP/IP, generally it is a good idea to have punishments in place for situations like that. Additionally, younger playerbase appears to be more likely to misbehave, but I might be wrong about that.

 

OK.. I get it..safe and healthy means unoffended these days of twisting tongues and divergent definition. Sorry ... this old codger grew up in the day when safe and healthy meant you were not in bodily danger and were not ill. Lord help me if I whined to my father that someone said something mean to me as all that I would get from that is the sticks and stones metaphor echoing in my ears. If I see something that may offend my sensibilities on the internets I just skim over it unless I can drop a sarcasm bomb on it.

 

Well, there were cases of people killing each other using a swat team, or driving others to suicide via social netowrk.

In context of gamedev it would means that developer would have one heck of incentive to make sure that something like this doesn't happen on their servers and on their communities.

 

The internet also allows for hundreds of people to attack someone all at once, something which was very rare back then.

If it is just one a-hole, than you just ignore them. Sticks and stones and all that. But the human psyche was not really built to handle this kind of abuse from hundreds or even thousands of people all at once.

 

I get it. It is the terms I see used. Non-abusive and friendly would be properly descriptive. If I had a community and someone was abusive simply for a "bloodsport" I would metaphorically kick their ankles with some humor a few times to see what makes them tick. If I found a vulnerable kid playing tough guy I may have a few fatherly words with him and warn them they will be ban hammered if they cannot act with a modicum of sociability. If I found a sociopath or sexual predator I would ban hammer them instantly and turn the predators data over to the jurisdictional authorities.. I would also have a list of words that get asterisked. That seemed to work well at zerohedge where the comments used to be raw and the profanities just whacked the sensibilities...but they began replacing the nasty words with asterisks and there was much less venom to them when read. Other than that folks are gonna argue and come from various cultural backgrounds. If they didn't enjoy mixing it up then why twitter? Mind you some of those replies are bereft of anything but sewage level effluvience..

 

To be honest, why does i matter for Unity? No offence, but unity does not make games. Has long bad history with managing communities. Why devs would listen some Unity advisors on keeping community healthy, which has no direct contact with game development, but opinion is based on others opinion, rather than experience?

@MDADigital please don't speak for whole Europe (again). As in the world, in EU there is plenty variation in culture and believes. I am in EU and I know plenty people, will find certain depictions as offensive. Is no point discussing if is right or not. Removing, or reducing potentially aggressive, or vulgar remarks, wont hurt community. And will bring chance to keep more people in. That is responsibility of channel admins, to recognize target audience.
Not recognizing that, will help loose your community.

@hamilton_unity
I co-manage past 2 years one small DC server around 200 members atm. It is for io game (none Unity). So the community is targeted around teens age.

Not many active members at same time. But certainly moderation input is required from time to time.
We allow moderate level of used language. But we do issue warns, when abuse, or aggression comes into play.
We do not allow for explicit images, neither such avatars, as were present above. We ask to change, when it happens however.

We do notice, that few aggressive and vulgar users, can put off many other users to participate and stop being active. So we trim them down, specially when multiple users report.
Bans also are issued occasionally, when no improvement in ethics is present.
We do not monitor voice channels however.


I don't think there is anything special different in managing game community than any other.
Well, the maybe with one major point, which are review. Upset users, or haters may leave bad reviews. But for these who participate in community discussion, probably will be very small %.

 

Cleaned up the off topic stuff. Thread bans will be handed out if it persists.

 

I'm very curious what ideas Unity has for helping developers build up their communities. Community building tools? Best practices guide? An entire game community platform? Could be interesting what, if anything, comes out of this.

Building communities, and getting people even aware of your game, is a common topic for indie devs, and not something a more code focused individual is necessarily very good at. I've noticed different personality types gravitate to becoming a code monkey than those who gravitate towards community building. Could be useful stuff.

 

Frankly, I don't want a Unity developed community building platform because if there's one thing Unity does not seem to understand at a corporate level, it's community building. I wouldn't trust a company that has left its user base with things such as:

• completely replacing the forum software in such a way that made them useless as both archival resources and communication tools
• leaving community hubs like Unity Answers to totally languish
• deleting the Feedback section entirely without any sort of archive
• just completely awful communication historically
• replacing the job forums with Unity Connect, a service so awful to use that this decision had to be undone

And this doesn't even begin to address the other issue of Unity stretching itself incredibly thin, offering passable at best versions of services that other companies already offer. This horizontal integration stuff is an absolute disaster and, were I to want to use community services, I would simply hire a community manager instead.

Because that's their job.

 

Actually, I agree.

We had unity connect. So a unity-made community building tool will be another unity connect.

So it would be best if unity didn't work on this kind of tool and made something else instead.

 

I only assume Unity wants some data for marketing purposes, and selling these somehow to higher tier customers, like if they know what they talking about.

That is why, I am also very sceptical about purpose of such survey.

 

On the other hand, Unity buys more crap than the average fertilizer company

 

Ehh, Unity has seemed to have done good so far with building the community on this forum.

 

You mean the same forums I covered in the first point?

Plus it's not like Unity has ever really directed anyone to the forums aside from blog posts linking to very specific threads. Hosting a forum on a high traffic site is some of the lowest tier community stuff you can even do. That's like saying Autodesk does good community building with their forums, when the simple reality of it is that they don't really do anything either.

 

The way I see it, Unity is learning, and they just announced in this thread that they are willing and want to learn about it. I don't see the problem with that.

 

I'm talking about the forum we're using right now. We both find value in being here for some reason. The discussion is good, the information is helpful, the members generally well behaved. The community Unity has built up is arguably the best in the games industry. They can't be screwing up everything.

Community building doesn't necessarily mean heavy handed directing of the community either. The right choice may be to provide the tools and the space, and let the community run with it. If it isn't working, make a change, if it is working, leave it be. If you make a mistake, like the forum software swap, try to correct it.

 

I have had dramatically better experiences on non-Unity dev forums, such as various subreddits and tigsource. Tigsource is a great example because they're yet another bunch of people who do active community management. I'll break it down. Here's what you see when you land on the tigsource forums:



The first think you see is the community landing subform, Townhall. This is basically the tigsource equivalent to General Discussion. Next up, you have the WIP subforum. These are two simple things that dramatically change the way a community works. I'll bring up the Unity forums next:



The first thing we've got are Announcements. This is... bad? And kinda ridiculous? Announcements should be a subforum of General Discussion (as should Meta-Forum Discussions, if I'm being real) because there's not a lot of reason for an announcements forum to have top priority in the listings.

Next is Getting Started. I think this is actually a great place for that! In fact, I think a better place for it would be the first listing. The second listing should be General Discussion, because that's going to be the general community landing. Immediately you present two things in doing this: you have created an immediate spot, first on the list, for new people to post inquiries; with General Discussion being the next one, you've fostered a sense that there is a community, instead of burying it all the way at the ass-end of nowhere.

Back to tigsource. Notice how high up their WIP forum is compared to Unity's? If you want to foster a sense of community, another great thing to do is make it so that interaction with other members isn't buried entirely. This is a game engine, yeah? We should probably have a higher priority showing what people are working on. Also, instead of tags, Asset Store WIP threads should get their own forum, or maybe a subforum of the Asset Store forum. Or, since a not insignificant amount of WIP assets are also on the asset store, maybe have a WIP tag in the Asset Store forum. There's a dramatic difference between "game developer community looking at each other's games" and "game developer community looking at each other's tools."

Back to Unity. Let's take a look at the next offender, Teaching and Certification. I single this out as a big offender because of this:



If I scroll down so that only the labels at the top of the Community Learning forum are on display, I can only see three unpinned threads (you may be able to see four, I have my tab bar at the bottom of the screen and it changes the real estate a bit). This is kinda messed up! That's not a forum, that's an LCD billboard. This is like the General Discussion issue from a couple years back where there were over a dozen pinned threads here. Some of these things shouldn't be pinned at all and some of them should probably be archived somewhere. I don't think anyone would lose any sleep if there was an Archived Threads (threads, not forums) forum for this sort of thing.

Okay, back to tigsource again. We can ignore Audio and Art because those two things are far more general than Unity as a forum should be. They're not about technical implementations, they're about the creative aspect. It's important to note that tigsource is a generalist forum when it comes to gamedev, after all. Playtesting and Design could probably be merged into a Design forum and a Playtesting subforum. Right now the closest thing to playtesting is Feedback Friday in the Game Design forum, and that has to be directly run by community members.

If Game Design wasn't totally buried, this may be less of an issue, but another couple things that might be nice is if there was any sort of Unity presence there and if there was a clear delineation between game design and game architecture. I swear, every time I go there I see something like how to paint a texture or what kind of architecture to use and these are more vague technical questions. Questions about vague technical things that don't fall into Scripting, etc. should probably go somewhere like General Discussion or Getting Started.

And speaking of the Scripting forum, why is it halfway down the forum listings? It's the most common way people will be engaging with Unity on a technical level outside of the Editor itself. This S***? This is all part of community building and management. Layout is more important than you can imagine because there is no justifiable reason for the forums to provide the level of friction they do when it comes to actual community interaction, and only slightly more justifiable reason for places like the Game Design forums and other less technical forums to have such a lacking presence from Unity.

Yeah, I'm not done. Back to tigsource because I want to talk about another one of their forums that's great for community: Jams & Events. Now, should Unity be hosting game jams? Yeah, actually, that might be a pretty good thing! When I was an active member on gamedev.net a million billion years ago, before engines like Unity were even a thing, game jams were seasonal events, often having things like prizes people would actually want. New GPUs sometimes, software licenses, various books back when books were a thing, gift certificates, that sort of thing.

And you know what? Those jam threads were usually some of the most active on the forums because loads of people were getting involved. They usually lasted two weeks to a month, ran four times a year max, and brought out everyone. On top of that, another way to build a sense of community would be to allow people on the forums to promote their own jams, just like they do there. On top of that, tigsource also allows for user event posts, which can range from offline meetups to just, well, other forms of social stuff and general light competition.

What Unity does is not just take an exceptionally passive role with the community and it doesn't work. If it did work, we'd see things like a lot more community growth instead of stuff like "user registers, makes two posts, leaves." These forums are treated as a means to an end by Unity, which is one of many reasons I don't really think they have any business in "building up safe and healthy game communities."

Damn, sure would be weird if I literally never said the thing you're implying here.

Yes, I need something to do while my projects import and/or build or while I'm on the toilet.

 

To play devil's advocate, General Discussion is often a location for lazy support thread posts, which are more appropriate in a one of the support forums dedicated to the topic. Placing General Discussion below them probably helps some threads end up in the correct forum. That may have been intentional.

I misunderstood the below line as implying Unity should be more active in running the forum and community, rather than standoffish. My apologies.

 

The forum is pretty much dead outside of general though

 

I don't know, cause Editor and Scripting are pretty busy forums.

 

There's always something going on in scripting, yeah. Hell, most of the time when I've had to post threads there, I've gotten answers in like... a couple hours, tops? I can't remember the last time I had a thread go more than half a day without a response

 

This is simply not true. I marked read all the topics two days ago, I think I didn't have a single one without bold this morning (I read a couple since then). Maybe there are some subforums which are dead, but not those which I visit frequently, that's for sure.

 

Just reading a post without integrating with it is kinda dead right? the bold text only indicates you have read it.

But yeah it's sub forum related general is alive and some others too. Physics is dead atleast if you have bigger problems than moving a rigid body lighting too.

Shader sub forum is hit or miss but the times there is a hit this guys hanging there do have valuable input.