Understanding how your online multiplayer game may be used to abuse your player base by bad apples is a key component to keeping a healthy audience of friendly, inclusive, and happy players. If you find your audience begin to skew more toxic and angry, take a look at your game and what elements may be specifically abrasive when played by someone who wants to ruin the fun for everyone else.
Games are not meant to be taken too seriously. There’s a reason that little league baseball diamonds have signs to warn parents against getting too heated during their child’s game. That being said, it is human to take something one is passionate about to heart. Telling folks that “it’s just a game” is often an unhelpful dismissal of the experience that person is having, especially in instances where the game design itself is to blame for the player’s frustrations. Keep in mind, a developer’s job is to evoke specific emotions: it is not the player’s job to be in the right mindset or react appropriately.
Giving players the chance to chat with one another is becoming increasingly unnecessary as accessibility features progress rapidly. Context specific pinging systems, canned alerts, and emojis offer plenty of chances for players to interact without the chance of them throwing slurs and insults at one another. Let folks communicate through their favorite VoIP application with people they like and keep in-game communication as an options for players to opt in for instead of having it as a default setting.
“I love being an annoying prick in online games, especially when I’m better than my opponent. Do I think that’s a particularly pleasant personality trait? Hell no!”
Bad actors can use more than just communication tools to troll and goad other players; specific game designs can often be abused, if not used as intended, to annoy and frustrate opponents. This is an established tactic in all competitive games, but there is a reason that competitive poker players are limited in how they can interact with the other players at the table. A good litmus test for whether a mechanic could potentially be used as a psychological shiv against others is for designers to playtest with competitive players rather than with other developers. Letting more invested players beat your ass by wiping your mental stack and making you want to punch your monitor can be an effective way to iron out these kinds of tools.
Animations, aesthetics, and sounds can also be used by players to annoy and frustrate others. Anyone who has played a particularly spicy Jigglypuff player in Smash Bros. knows how old it gets to hear them taunt repeatedly from across the stage. Costumes and cosmetics can be specifically tailored to vex opponents just as easily. Mortal Kombat’s fatalities are infamous for causing players to turn off their game in anger. Were they just as bad back in the arcades? Probably, but being online only exacerbates the issue.
There is a long precedent of both games that lean into aggressive behavior and avert negative play experiences through clever design. Mortal Kombat 1 is an example of playing both sides: players can brutally disembowel each other post-match but attempting to tea-bag one’s opponent will result in an innocuous taunt instead. NetherRealm Studios also made the baffling decision to let players chat over VoIP by default. Apex Legends does a stellar job of encouraging interaction between team mates without requiring them to communicate verbally or through chat. Most games don’t even allow randomly matchmade opponents to chat with one another, but even canned messages and emojis can be abused. At the end of the day, there is nothing to replace community moderation, but developers have plenty of tools in their repertoire to avert a player’s influence over others’ emotional wellbeing.
Each piece of your design can and will be used against other players by bad actors if you let them. I should know… I love being an annoying prick in online games, especially when I’m better than my opponent. Do I think that’s a particularly pleasant personality trait? Hell no! There will always be a place for people like me in online games, but it should be a result of intentional design and not an accidental byproduct of innocent intentions. Keep in mind how players will play your game beyond the boundaries of your expectations and help avoid tensions among players by resolving those pain points before they become cudgels used to beat your audience into submission.
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