ABOVE LEFT: After a
few Black Ops II
multiplayer tweaks,
design director David
Vonderhaar received
death threats.
LEF T: Minecraft is so
phenomenally
popular, it has both
the best and the
worst of
communities.Groups of Wrath
FE ATURE
WILL OVERGARD
Twitch streamer and
former community
manager.PROFILE
W
hen I speak to Will Overgard, he’s
enthusiastic, friendly, and
immediately likable; attributes
which serve him well on Twitch,
where he streams as Viking_Blonde.
Bursting with energy, he gleefully
chats with me about his previous
life in the games industry working
for companies including Creative
Assembly, Improbable, and
RocketWerkz. I warm to him
within seconds. So why did three
total strangers once wish him death
by cancer? Why does anybody on
the internet suffer threats and
hatred from people they don’t
know? The answer (for community
managers I’ve spoken to, at least) is
complicated, and leads me to realise
that you and I aren’t as many steps
away from such behaviour as we
may like to believe.Take another, particularly horrifying
example of harassment that Will gave
me: “A group of individuals came up
with a horrible story involving
children,” he says. “They leapt into
the YouTube comments and started
telling the story at each other, like
‘Oh, did you hear the story of Will
doing this horrible thing?’ ‘Oh, I did
hear that, but did you hear this fact?’
‘No, I did not hear that, did you hear
this fact?’ And they tell this horrific
story in the comments, and then
upvote each other.”
There’s no shortage of people
within the industry with similar
horror stories. Today, James
Bartholomeou works at PR firm Ico
Partners, but for two years he was a
community manager at Focus Home
Interactive. Like any job, it involved
both highs and lows, but one of the
worst times was when a highly
anticipated game he was looking after
was repeatedly delayed. This
infuriated some members of the
community so much, things took a
dark turn. “Eventually it got to the
point where we were getting death
threats,” James says, with a
casualness that actually shocks me. “Ithink I’m quite lucky in that I only
got a few too, especially talking to
other colleagues.”THREAT BOARD
But why? How do people become so
vicious towards complete strangers
managing the community of a
videogame? It’s worth noting that
every community manager I spoke to
told me that they never experienced
any such vile behaviour at in-person
events, nor would they ever expect to.
It’s no secret that online anonymity
lends people the confidence to say
and do things they’d never repeat in
person, but there’s another
anonymity at play, too – that of the
videogame developers themselves.
Dr Alison Lamont is a lecturer in
sociology and criminology at the
University of Roehampton, and she’s
conducted extensive research into
the behaviour of online communities.
“I think [community managers are]
not seen as individual human
beings,” she tells me. “It is a
corporation that people are attacking
and, you know, the way capitalism is
we are very often at the wrong end
of corporations and profit seeking.
And, yeah, it becomes, you know, fair