Mediaboss Marketing

Gaming has always been a popular form of escapism, but that might be changing. Games are increasingly social, allowing players to express themselves and their beliefs to one another. Combine that with a larger player base than ever before and plenty of fractious topics on which people disagree, and it's entirely predictable that many of the debates in the real world would spill over into virtual ones.

That said, disputes in game communities are nothing new, as a trio of industry veterans--Richard Vogel, Raph Koster, and Gordon Walton--all of whom worked on the MMORPGs Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies--shared their own experiences and advice today in a Game Developers Conference session titled "Managing Game Communities Within the Culture Wars." It's not the first time the group has done this at GDC; it's just been 14 years since the last time they discussed the topic.

"That's part of the insidious problem of filter bubbles. It's that we actively collaborate in building them."

Raph Koster

"If this talk doesn't piss you off at some point, then maybe we're doing it wrong," Koster said.

Koster began by recapping what the industry knows about community trends today, with greater polarization of views, an increase in apparent harassment campaigns, and more contentious relationships between developers and players. Koster said there are a few reasons for it, starting with one explained in the book "The Filter Bubble." The internet has been designed to filter people's search results based on what big companies like Google think they're like, Koster said. So someone searching for "abortion" in North Carolina may get a link to adoption agencies, while someone who does the same search in San Francisco may get a link to Planned Parenthood. In politics, these companies are looking to never show users content that disagrees with their world view, and Vogel said it's only going to get worse as wearable computing takes off and these companies understand more about where you go and what you do.

"That's part of the insidious problem of filter bubbles," Koster said. "It's that we actively collaborate in building them."

Koster then brought up The Parable of the Polygons, a free web browser game that attempted to explain why innocuous choices add up to harmful trends. The game particularly talks about humans self-segregating into homogenous groups, where everyone around them is the same. Vogel said if people were confined in this GDC room for a week, they would very quickly start forming cliques and groups and those would eventually give rise to friction and violence.

When you have groups that strongly identify with that group and then refuse to communicate across boundaries, what happens is almost exactly like inflammation in the body," Koster said.

He pointed to Switzerland, a diverse country, but one where the different groups are divided into homogenized areas. He then showed a heat map of Switzerland showing crimes, and noted that the areas where crime was most prevalent were the areas where these different groups bordered each other. Contact between the groups is what causes inflammation. Koster calls it disturbing because it sounds like segregation, but Vogel and Walton pointed out that it's a very basic, very human reaction. Koster suggested that with the internet increasingly herding people into homogenous groups, and those groups causing problems when they interact, the problems going on right now are only going to get worse.

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Community management in the culture wars