“I do research on player harassment. Approaches could involve: adequate
responses, including punishment like game suspensions and bans where
possible; prosocial community management; adequate training for community
managers; stronger ethical knowledge within studios and clear boundaries;
tackling a fear of angering players and associated revenue loss; studio solidarity;
adequate support for anyone affected; and more. It begins with the industry
understanding this is serious and it is not just coming from ‘passionate players.’
It’s abuse.”
They’d probably have some good insight into the actual behaviors constituting what game devs feel as harassment.
You’re right that it’s subjective, but that just means there isn’t any consensus on what constitutes harassment.
Anyway, I think it’s safe to assume that most respondents wouldn’t have considered criticisms or negative feedback to be harassment.
Edit: though, it’s worth noting that 62% of respondents were solo developers, who may very well have considered negative feedback to be a form of harassment. Nobody wants to hear that people don’t like something they’ve worked hard on, after all.
Edit 2: I misread, the above edit is incorrect.
All I’m saying is that you have to take these sorts of things with a grain of salt unless you’ve got access to the source data, and even then, if the questions aren’t worded just so then you’re looking at an approximation, at best.
The self awareness. The more ‘ethical’ games become the less they sell. See Harry Potter for more info, literally raking in pre orders because it makes the blue hairs mald.
Kinda why I generally attempt to specify that I’m criticizing the company (or management). Not the people working at it (managers don’t work, they delegate).
Direct and personal abuse is unacceptable. Critiquing a person or department for not performing their role is something else entirely, but some folks find it difficult to criticize without attacking, other times people take valid criticism as an attack.
The only thing we’re able to control is our own statements. We can’t control how others will perceive what we’ve stated. People are people, sometimes, they’re going to react in a way that isn’t as intended.
My initial thought was that the quoted statement was an interesting (as in quite strange) take on things for someone who joined the forums around the time of VT2’s release. It seems that you didn’t engage in the forums until DT’s release though, which makes more sense when posting this.
As a lot of people has mentioned, it’s obviously not ethical, moral or legal to reach out to individuals with death threats and it’s even a bit worse if it’s to a non-public person on their private account, home address, etc. If you’re a private individual or a public person, it’s just not okay.
My guess is that the people entertaining such practices aren’t exclusive to the gaming communities but are, frankly, disturbed individuals that get a feeling of power or accomplishment by acting in that way (anonymously). It’s probably the biggest downside of the internet and anonymity in my opinion.
For Fatshark the quote the above sums it up well. For context they fail at all three points for the most-part. I’m not saying that they’re doing it intentionally or that any specific person is to blame, but I dare say they don’t only fail at those points but that they are repeat offenders (as a company). This ties in to my comment about when you joined the forums. This is not my first rodeo and I’m not alone in being stupid for purchasing another of their games at release.
I don’t know what the personal inboxes of employees look like, but on the official forums and Reddit the critique is for the most-part aimed at the company. Some critique has been directed at Martin Wahlund, the CEO, some have been directed at the Victor Magnusson (context: the interview in Corren late December) and Hedge has received some flak for a few statements that were made post-release (for the most part the majority of the community is rather protective of the CMs).
I don’t know the details of the survey they based the article on, but it did give me vibes similar to the statement of the producers(?) of the Witcher (tv series) contra the statement from Cavill concerning the fan base. One interpretation was “toxic community” and another interpretation was “devoted fans that feels let down”.
Going back to Darkide. Obviously Fatshark is running the show and making all the final decision about the product. But. If you market a product in a certain way, release a product radically different from what you marketed, don’t address it, release the product in a very unfinished state, fail to communicate about it, while failing to address the unfinished product you release interviews about how happy you are about the state of the product, then you don’t get to blame the community.
It’s not rocket science and it’s definitely not a fire that was started by a loud minority within the community. @Dizzy721 You should re-visit this topic in 6 months and see if it aged well. I mean that sincerely.
I’ve been part of online gaming communities for 17 years now and have seen loads of bad games come and go. At a macro level, my personal experience has been that communities have become more abusive over time and this survey is a datapoint in favor of that theory. Perhaps they’ve always been this way and the only thing that has changed is my maturity level, but that is not the sentiment I see from people involved in the industry. Outside of politics, I don’t know of a worse mainstream culture than gaming.
I think it is a loud minority that is leading to issues and could easily be addressed by the community. A most recent example: The top post from reddit in the last 24 hours is a screenshot of harassment on the official discord. link here There is no pushback in the comments. It’s just memes haha. Does fatshark deserve to be spammed by anti-social gamers because they released a game that did not meet their expectations? We normalize this behavior when we shrug it off and say that this is just how the internet is. If these behaviors were ever encountered IRL, these people would be ostracized so quickly.
Without direct comment (and let me know if I have missed it) from fatshark as to why communications have basically stopped, we’re both speculating. Yes history has shown that they can be uncommunicative in the past but we had regular communication leading up to and past release of this game. And history/research has also shown that “gamers” are highly toxic. There are tons of examples of it happening in the context of this community.
It’s not fair to pin this solely on the gaming community. Society in general has become more abusive toward eachother over the past 20 years.
Edit: I should say “directly” abusive. People have always been pretty nasty to others outside of their own groups. One of the fun sideeffects of the world becoming more connected via the internet - New and exciting opportunities to make eachother feel bad!
I pretty much agree with your larger point but imo this is kind of a stretch for what constitutes harassment. If any of the CMs see it and consider it harassment I’m not gonna argue with them, but this seems like pretty tame ribbing to me. Different story if they’re doing this every day or something but idk, seems harmless tbh.
The people involved were muted/suspended. Is it not harassing a company to go spam their official discord server and then post about it on a separate social media site? It’s certainly more than just voicing negative criticism. Where is the line?
In this case, no, because they’re not making fun of the person who spoke the words. The joke is clearly that the same message keeps getting repeated over and over.
Now, if we were talking about “immeasurably complex”, then yes, a lot of the times that is brought up in a derisive manner, it’s targeting the individual who said it.
That’s up to the people on the receiving end. Like I said, I’m not gonna argue with the CMs if they feel harassed by that, but I will disagree with someone declaring harassment on their behalf if their evidence is…that.
Yeah, spamming the chat is juvenile and not constructive criticism, and probably against the server rules which is likely why the people doing it got muted, but come on, this is not comparable to death threats in your dms or even a rude callout. This is, at worst, a kind of mean spirited joke imo, more like a prank phone call than a personal attack.
One person doing one prank call is probably not a harasser. A thousand people doing one prank call on one person certainly is a harassment campaign. You’re right that I shouldn’t claim harassment on anyone’s behalf but can we at least agree the behavior is troubling? It isn’t like this is the only example of similar behavior. Do you think that even if this doesn’t fall under a narrow definition of harassment that encountering this behavior frequently might alter how you interact with the community?