[Perry] Shaping Player Behavior

So I’m a fairly avid gamer.

Shocking, I know. When you’ve picked your jaws up off the floor, we can continue.

Lately, a constant source of both absolute frustration and fierce competitive joy is League of Legends.

For those (lucky people!) not in the know, League is a free to play team based competitive game where everyone choose a champion to fight alongside your team as you kill waves of computer controlled critters, destroy big scary towers and bust down the enemy base.

All the while, there’s an opposing team that has the exact same goals and you all meet in the middle in “glorious” combat.

There’s a problem with games like these and in short, it comes down to the people.

People are asshats.

Wait, let me amend that.

Normally? People tend to be fairly decent. Maybe not all of the time, but for the most part. But when you toss people onto the internet? When you afford them the ‘protection’ of anonymity, a lot of people turn into these curiously bigoted, insensitive pricks.

Nobody really looked into why that is. When faced with the issue, many people just shrugged and tossed it off as a natural consequence of online gaming and in NO gaming genre is this phenomenon (I just had some SERIOUS trouble spelling that word) as prevalent as it is in a competitive team-based environment.

The player base of League of Legends has gotten a little bit better. In a large part, this is due to the initiative shown by the company (Riot Games) to take on the monumental task of…attempting to reform player behavior.

Look, trash talking is a part of gaming culture. This is true and it can be a lot of fun, I’m not going to lie. But when you start making bigoted and racist comments? Or when you start telling people to kill themselves over a bunch of pixels on the screen? That’s just not right, and I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels this way.

Riot is doing a lot to try and reform their player base and one of the men spear-heading the effort is Jeffrey “Lyte” Lin, who is the lead designer of social systems and has a background in psychology and neuroscience.

Fairly recently, at the Game Developer Conference, Lin took the stage with a panel titled “The Science Behind Shaping Player Behavior in Online Games.” 

It’s a 25 minute presentation and it’s a fairly interesting thing to check out, especially if you’ve ever done any online gaming (or browsed around the internet in general) and wondered why people were such jackasses online.

The highlight of the presentation for me was the Optimus Experiment (it’s the 8th category from the bottom on the left hand side if you want to skip to just that) where they detail an experiment they’re running with the League of Legends community.

Essentially? They’re looking into how changing the color of one line of text before or right at the beginning of the game (the loading screen tip) can lead to less (or more!) toxic behavior in the game itself.

It’s fairly interesting stuff and if you have any interest in the shaping of player behavior or even how the smallest things can influence our moods, you might want to check it out.

 

 

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