Taming the Online Savage

It's surprising how much, even now, gamers still look back on the era of offline multiplayer with a certain rose-tinted nostalgia. I think our affection stems largely from the fact that split-screen multiplayer was once a gentlemen's sport – gamers knew the people they were playing with, and generally confined themselves to the sort of trash-talking and underhanded tactics one reserves for dear friends. Competition was fierce, but not cruel.

And then online matchmaking came along, one of the greatest evolutions in video gaming since its earliest 8-bit ancestors crawled out of the primordial ooze. It changed our very attitudes and preconceptions of the medium. Gamers were no longer content to be the best amongst their wider circle of friends when they could just as easily pit themselves against every player in the world. They no longer had to confine their angry outbursts to dismissible forum posts when they could broadcast their brazen and obnoxious foul-mouthery during the match while hidden behind a shimmering veil of anonymity.

Perhaps the online experience tapped into some primal root of mankind's subconscious. Perhaps the thrill of killing the faceless Other reawakened in us some dormant memory of our savage forebears. Or perhaps – and this is more likely – there were already an awful lot of douchebags hooked up to consoles throughout the world, and the online battleground just tossed them all together like feral cats in a sack. Regardless, for all of its incredible features and social influence, Internet gaming encouraged us to be more ambitious, more ruthless, and to care far less about the way we treated our opponents. Basically, it gave us all the tools to be tools.

Everything is expressed more elegantly through the medium of cats.

Developers know this better than anyone. They can't just make a game, release it and turn their attention to the next anymore – they now have a responsibility to maintain servers for years afterwards and, more importantly, to moderate their player base as best they can. It's an inexhaustible war that has already spurred the invention of such weapons as the banhammer (a favourite of Bungie), the mute switch (which to this day has saved countless Halo and Call of Duty fans from piercing their own eardrums), the /ignore command (now mandatory for all WoW players entering trade chat), the report button and the anti-cheat program. As the player discovers new methods of abuse, irrational argument, trolling, bigotry and unfocused aggression, the developer contrives ever more innovative measures to thwart him – while others choose to avoid combat entirely.

Let's take a look at three approaches.

BLIZZARD - THE BENEVOLENT DICTATOR

Here's a company that deserves military decoration. Recognised as the architect of some of the most iconic online multiplayer titles of all time, followed by millions and revered by many Koreans as a three-headed animal deity, Blizzard Entertainment has had the heavy burden of moderating one of the largest and most fanatical player bases in the world. With a legion of moderators patrolling its forums and a small guerrilla army of Game Masters overseeing its MMORPG, the developer daily throws its back against an endless horde of trolls, griefers, spammers, gold farmers and rank-and-file idiots. This endeavour has led the company to implement numerous in-game and forum moderation measures in the past, but none is more universally notorious than the application of the Real ID system to forum chat – which, incidentally, would have recently celebrated its first anniversary if it had ever gone ahead.

Real ID essentially required that all users posting in the forum do so under their actual name. Previously, the system had applied in-game only to players who already knew each other personally (and it still performs that function today), but in the forums you'd be declaring your identity publicly whenever you contributed to discussion. The rationale behind the system was obvious; Blizzard hoped that by disarming its users of their anonymity, they'd be forced to stand by their remarks, which in turn might have made them think a little more carefully before facerolling the keyboard and pressing enter. It was also clearly an attempt to foster a greater sense of community, drawing from social networking phenomena like Facebook to bring warring gamers closer to each other.

BloodyMuzzle the Worgen Mage, or Brian Smith, an electrician who lives in Sydney with his parents?

And it did, perversely – gamers and press alike were all, for a brief shining moment, united in their absolute hatred of the idea. Blizzard's forum received the largest surge of feedback in its entire history, with over a thousand pages of angry replies in the first twenty-four hours. People were outraged at being robbed of their privacy, and concerned at the potential dangers they were being exposed to. One unfortunate Blizzard employee posted his own name on the forum to reassure players, and in response, players were able to locate his photo, age, contact address and phone number, prior convictions and details of his family.

It wasn't the gaming community's finest hour, but it sent a clear message. Real ID had just as much potential to be a catastrophic violation of security, and nobody was willing to take that risk. In Blizzard's defence, it was an admirable attempt to flush out the most toxic elements of its player base, but anonymity is, in many ways, a necessary evil – it protects the guilty and innocent alike. The plan was scrapped soon after, and the developer has made little mention of it since. For now at least, the veil stays firmly in place.

RIOT GAMES - THE REVOLUTIONARY

Watching its tragically short and ill-fated Real ID system being torn apart by an angry lynch mob taught Blizzard a valuable lesson: an overwhelmingly unpopular proposal is not likely to be a successful one. Developers are free to lay down their own ground rules, but without a certain level of support from their players, they do so at their own peril. League of Legends developer Riot Games is well aware of this, and the team is taking an altogether different (but no less radical) approach. It's out to win hearts and minds with its new Tribunal system, which courts that most wild and unpredictable mistress – democracy.

The Tribunal is a moderation system that places the responsibility of judging player conduct in the hands of the players themselves. If someone receives enough reports for alleged misconduct to attract the system's attention, it compiles as much information as possible (chat transcripts, match results, etc.) and links the reports to Riot's website, where the rest of the community can view the evidence and give their ruling – Pardon or Punish.

Only players who've reached the level cap of 30 can vote, obviously to ensure that they have a decent understanding of the Summoner's Code (LoL's code of conduct) and what the actual match statistics mean. Furthermore, Riot isn't naive enough to think that users will perform any sort of jury duty without an incentive, so they've thrown in a little sweetener for those who take it seriously. Each time a player's vote matches that of the majority, they're rewarded with Influence Points, LoL's earnable in-game currency for purchasing new content.

The system also has a way of weeding out players who consistently vote against the clear consensus – that is, players who obviously have no moral compass whatsoever – and you're required to look at the evidence in a case for at least one minute before ruling, so you can't just hammer the Punish button thirty times and call it a day. Finally, when a guilty verdict places the offending player at risk of a long-term or permanent ban, the case is always double-checked by a Riot employee to ensure that the ruling is legitimate.

You got served.

On paper, the Tribunal ticks all the boxes. It vastly reduces the amount of frivolous reports that Riot employees have to trawl through every day, it empowers players to take part in cleaning up their own conduct, it generally assents to the will of the people (but not the tyranny of the majority) and everyone gets to keep their privacy. The system went into limited release in late May, and so has far encountered no major objections, except for some issues with players not receiving their daily IP reward. It's a little early to call it a victory just yet, but nobody's lighting the torches, sharpening the pitchforks and stringing a noose on the old oak outside of town – it's certainly not a defeat.

NINTENDO - THE PACIFIST

Gamers are a nostalgic lot, yes, but Nintendo fans are by far the most adept at it, leaping back and forth between the past and present like an excitable fairy boy with a magic ocarina. There's a simple reason for this (beyond the fact that any given Zelda game will reappear on at least four different consoles in its lifetime) – for them, the era of offline multiplayer never really ended.

Nintendo has always been about the family-oriented gaming experience. Though it has weathered scathing remarks from the hardcore gaming crowd for a long time now, its vision for multiplayer has steadfastly remained an intimate one. The developer's most recent TV commercials still show friends and family sitting together around a television having good ol'-fashioned "winning isn't everything" fun (they also show Olivia Newton-John improving her intelligence, but that's pure science fiction), a tableau increasingly at odds with the hostility of the online environment.

That's not to say that Nintendo doesn't develop online games – Wii titles such as Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mario Kart Wii have certainly included online multiplayer content. But these have been carefully censored and controlled at all times to prevent even the slightest possibility of hurtful or unsporting behaviour. Brawl in particular, a game that seemed to lend itself almost excruciatingly to online competition (and whose predecessors already enjoyed cult status as eSports among enthusiasts), really only dipped its toe in the churning waters.

One could play with strangers, but without ever knowing their name or communicating with them in any way; in fact, if the other person dropped out during the match it would be virtually impossible to tell if you were still facing a human opponent or a computer. Another frequently requested feature, leader boards, were quickly scrapped as well, as Masahiro Sakurai and his team believed any attempt to rank players by skill would promote aggressive competition and make those further down the ladder feel bad about themselves.

Mario Kart Wii delivered this much at least, with one of the more robust online offerings to grace the Wii. Players could challenge each other's times, had ongoing comparative scores and could even identify themselves with a username, but were still not able to correspond with unknown players in any way, and Nintendo certainly made no attempt to incorporate Wii Speak functionality following its later release. Which was probably for the best, actually – I'd rather not have listened to angry motorists telling me where to stick my motherf***ing piece of **** blue f***ing shell every two minutes.

We never tire of using Nintendo's ridiculous lifestyle photography.

The result was, in some ways, a suboptimal experience. Many users felt muzzled and restricted, and the lack of social contact made these modes highly impersonal. And yet, played as they are meant to be played, Nintendo games still capture the very best elements of traditional multiplayer. Even now, in my early twenties, I can boot up any first-party Wii title with a group of friends and enjoy the same frivolity I had a decade ago (with the notable addition of alcohol).

Whether we enjoy their whimsical approach or not, we cannot deny that Nintendo has thus far protected its players from the vulgarity of their peers, and saved itself from the inevitable struggle of policing them. It will be fascinating to see how far the developer relents with the release of the Wii U, given that the controller's built-in camera and microphone so evidently lend themselves to online interaction.

So, how do we win the war against gaming's worst character traits? Can gamers maintain a spirit of competition online without threatening to burn each other with a combustible lemon? Can the developer tame the savage, or in Riot's case, can the savage tame himself? Give us your thoughts below. Or if you like, just spew a lot of inarticulate vitriol so the rest of us can remember what we're fighting for.