MMORPG Dev Explains How Game Design Can Cure Twitter Dysfunction And Social Shaming

There’s a problem with our online communities and we all know it. Despite supplanting so much of our society, our interactions online are so much coarser than anything we encounter in face-to-face reality.

iDigitalTimes spoke with MMORPG designer Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, the upcoming Crowfall) about lessons online communities can steal from the gaming world to make our interactions with each other a little more bearable.

A great deal of recent attention on the way we treat each other online is thanks to a new book from British journalist Jon Ronson. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed details the perverse punishments that can result when the weight of an entire online community is rallied against individuals, often for ludicrously petty infractions.

Koster shares many of Ronson’s laments.

"It’s the use of public shame, of ostracizing people, that’s at the heart of all of this," Koster said. "It’s usually done for altruistic reasons… the people who are doing it don’t think they’re doing a bad thing, they think they’re doing a good thing.”

But Koster doesn’t put the blame on human nature.

“It’s a mistake to say that people are awful. Psychologists talk about the fundamental attribution error, which is that people’s behavior is determined by their character, when, in fact, people’s behavior is very driven by their environment.”

The biggest problem Koster identifies with our online communities is that their immense scale is essentially invisible to users, allowing for minor aggravations to snowball.

“With the Internet, it’s all so much amplified that any individual participant can’t tell what they are collaborating and creating… one person calling for someone’s head is one thing, but for the recipient there might be a million,” Koster said.

While chaotic communities like Twitter are relatively new, game design has been confronting some of these same problems for decades.

“I think there’s quite a lot of lessons from MMORPGs. MMORPGs and their predecessors go back to the late 70’s, so there are a lot of lessons from large-scale game management.”

One example is the current fondness for comment systems with a downvoting and upvoting component.

“It seems intuitively good,” Koster says, “but game community managers figured out a long time ago that downvote systems are a bad idea.”

The problem, he said, lies in the incentives they offer the user.

“They encourage groups to attack one another by downvoting. This encourages people to reset their identity rather than building them back up. It leads to anonymity, which leads to worse behavior.”

On a Game Developers Conference (GDC) panel, Koster, alongside game developers Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton, outlined some other lessons the culture wars can take from computer game communities:

• “Dividing and segmenting your community works really well.. Make sure you don’t have more than 150 regular commenters per forum, and if you do it’s time to create another sub-community.”

• “Create ‘honeypots’ for bad behavior: Provide an ‘unsafe space.’”

• Pseudonymity is okay, but incentivize consistency. Reward consistent positive contributions.

• Discourage “downvoting, brigading, or other negative feedback loops.”

Unfortunately, it’s easy to see where many of these lessons are inapplicable in immense communities like Twitter. It’s even probable that some of our online spaces are designed to keep interaction rancorous. Koster points outs that “a lot of these communities might enjoy having controversy at all times, rather than having a stable, steady community.”

Rather than blaming each other or human nature, it becomes incumbent on us, the users, to demand change to the structures that encourage us to hurt each other. “We should be looking at social media channels. What structure are they providing?”

The first hurdle is simple acknowledgment of the very real damage that’s possible in online spaces. By Koster’s reckoning, this is an old lesson we’ll need to relearn.

“Public shaming as a tool of justice was actually outlawed in a number of countries 100 to 150 years ago, because it’s too blunt an instrument," Koster said. "The stocks, walks of shame, pretty much every country stopped doing that over 100 years ago. We’ve probably forgot how painful that is and how powerful and cruel it can be to the victim.”