#after being stuck with 3 others due to a disconnected player for like... 5 minutes... i feel like were close friends now

[hanayotta]

there's NOTHING sweeter than a group of players desperately trying to have a conversation with the limited options of stickers and catchphrases

[vivianwritesaboutgames]

More Isn’t Always Better: Splatoon 2 and Overwatch

This is an essay I wrote in October of 2017 for my Multiplayer design class.

Player communication is a must to include in almost all multiplayer games, but especially so in online team based games. People need to communicate in order to work well as a team, so how do you allow and incentivize players to communicate? Most games, including Overwatch, use voice chat to solve this problem, but some also include methods of communication for those who don’t want to or can’t use voice chat. These can range from a very simple “Yes!” or “I died” to more complex phrases like “My Ultimate is ready” or “Defend the point,” but having more phrases to communicate doesn’t always lead to cooperation.

           In Overwatch, a competitive team based shooter, two teams of six players each attempt to accomplish a goal which varies by map. These goals can include moving an object from one end of the map to another, contesting a king of the hill style point on the map, etc. To communicate with their team, the player has access to both voice chat, text chat, and a wheel of pre-recorded phrases their character can say. Each player has access to the following phrases from the wheel: “Hello”, “Understood”, “Group Up Here”, “Thank You”, “I Need Healing”, saying the status of their ultimate meter, and more character specific emotes and voice lines that the player can get from loot boxes. Apart from those acquired from loot boxes, all players have access to all of these phrases, some such as “Understood” can be bound to a keypress and be used to say even more phrases like “Move the Payload” while looking at an object in the game world. However, this wealth of options to communicate has led to Overwatch’s community becoming incredibly toxic.

           In a popular online multiplayer game, toxicity is inevitable. When people have anonymity and can essentially say whatever they like without consequence there will be those who abuse the system to abuse and insult others. That doesn’t mean that forms of open communication shouldn’t exist, but there should be some way to punish unsportsmanlike behavior. Overwatch does include a way to report this behavior, but players are unsure if it actually does anything as no feedback is received to show that action was taken by the moderators against the offending player. To avoid toxicity in the first place, players can turn off voice chat and text chat, though they cannot opt out of chat entirely as phrases will still be heard and displayed and abused by players spamming certain phrases. Overwatch gives players a wealth of options to communicate, but as a result it is very difficult for players to avoid toxicity.

           On the opposite end of the communication spectrum, there is Splatoon 2, a competitive team based shooter. In Splatoon 2, players attempt to cover the majority of the map in their team’s color of ink, escort an object to a certain point of the map, or control a certain place on the map. The game focuses on mobility in that players can turn into a squid to swim through their color of ink. In contrast to Overwatch, Splatoon 2 offers a total of 3 ways to communicate during gameplay. By pressing up or down on the D-Pad, players can say the following phrases: “This Way!”, “Booyah!”, and “Ouch” which is only available when the player has died and replaces the “This Way!” command. While there are fewer phrases, they are more generic and can be used in multiple situations. For example, the “Booyah!” command could be used to congratulate another player, to say “I just killed an enemy player or multiple opponents,” or even “We’re winning, good job!” In essence, it is a positive exclamation. “This Way!” and “Ouch!” can be used to tell your team where to go next or where enemies are, and generally indicate a location where action needs to be taken. Outside of matches, Splatoon 2 also includes a way for players to display messages in the game’s hub through drawings. These drawings must be shared through either twitter or Facebook in order to be posted and are heavily moderated as well, with players having a multitude of options in reporting inappropriate or mean-spirited posts. This system has resulted in a thriving community of artists as well as generally positive messages, for example over the summer of 2017 there was a flood of transgender positive posts and even though there were some who were angry at this development they were few in number and easily reported.

           Splatoon 2 avoids toxicity by limiting the ways players can communicate, but toxicity does still exist in the game. During matches, toxic players will “Squid Bag”, or rapidly switching between Squid and Kid forms, to insult others. Other ways players can be toxic not unique to Splatoon 2 are players repeatedly targeting an opponent instead of completing the objective, killing players just as they spawn, or disconnecting from a match they are losing.

Disconnecting players is a common problem Overwatch and Splatoon 2 face, though they attempt to solve it in different ways. In Overwatch, the game attempts to find another player to fill the empty spot, though this often results in the joining player immediately seeing their team lose before even being able to pick their character. Splatoon 2 does nothing; the disconnecting player’s team is just at a disadvantage for the rest of the match. While matches in the game are very short, about 5 minutes, it feels unfair that players who were already losing the match no longer have a chance to make a comeback. Both games also attempt to punish people who disconnect, by reducing experience earned and a temporary ban respectively, though they are very weak punishments that don’t serve to discourage disconnections.

A significant challenge in designing a multiplayer game is trying to ensure that players are courteous to each other and encourage positive player interaction. There are a few options: rewarding players for good behavior or helping others; punishing players for bad behavior; or letting players police themselves and doing nothing. Overwatch and Splatoon 2 take the latter two approaches, with Overwatch focusing on punishment (however lenient) and Splatoon 2 focusing on letting players police themselves.

Not many games attempt to reward good player behavior, but Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (FFXIV) has a mentor system in which experienced players and new players are given access to a special chat channel in which mentors can give advice and help novices. The reward for becoming a mentor is a crown symbol next to your name in game. This system hasn’t had much of an effect on the game’s community, however, as some players become mentors and proceed to not help players it has improved the experience for some starting players though.

In her book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds, Celia Pearce writes about The Gathering of Uru (TGU), a group of players who met in a now defunct game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst in which players worked together to solve puzzles. This group has stuck together even after the game they all met in was shut down, so obviously they must have had a very positive experience playing the game and interacting with each other. Since Uru was a cooperative, not competitive game, it fostered an environment in which players could easily form relationships with one another. FFXIV is also a mostly cooperative experience, however when players interact it is usually with people from other servers who they will never see again or people who are already a part of their circle of friends or guild, so the type of game and how frequently players see each other is also a factor in how players will interact.

While Uru had puzzle solving, according to people Pearce interviewed most players focused on socializing and while there are many games with this focus their communities aren’t generally considered toxic. So how can competitive games encourage players to be nice to each other aside from rewards and punishments?

One solution is to match players of similar skills together, if players feel like they played a fair and balanced match they are less likely to become angry with each other. You can determine player skill in many ways such as matches won, kills per match, etc. Although there will be some players who are mismatched for one reason or another, this system would help more players than hurt.

Another way is for players to rate each other after a match based on various criteria, like teamwork or helpfulness.  Positive rated players would be matched with other positive or neutral players, while negatively rated players would be matched with other negatively rated players or eventually outright banned. This could be abused by some players, or not used at all, but even if only some use it properly it would help to sort out unsportsmanlike conduct.

A third solution is to give equal rewards to winners and losers, or to not punish losers. Competitive games often reward winners with items or experience. To discourage players from leaving a match early, the game will give them the same reward if they win or lose. While this would help with some disconnecting players, there are those who just can’t handle losing and would disconnect anyway or some who wouldn’t see a point in trying if they get the same rewards win or lose.

In conclusion, outside of social games it is difficult to encourage players to be kind to one another due to multiple reasons such as the anonymity of the internet or knowing you will most likely never see that person again. There are many ways to encourage kindness, but each comes with its own drawbacks. When designing a multiplayer game, a designer should assume the worst case scenario when it comes to player behavior, design their game around that, and adjust the game as necessary according to the needs of the players.

 Bibliography

Overwatch, Blizzard, 2016-2017, Video Game

Splatoon 2, Nintendo, 2017, Video Game

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Square Enix, 2013, Video Game

Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. MIT Press, 2011.