Groups of Wrath
FE ATURE
BEING FACED WITHEXTREME NEGATIVITYAND HARASSMENTCAN TAKE A TOLLbeing infiltrated by non-white,
non-male players, and that kind of
defensiveness again that goes back
into this idea of identity and trying to
protect an identity, [regardless of] the
validity of that identity.”
Community managers are
individual, real, human beings; and
being faced with extreme negativity
and harassment can take a toll. In
February, videogame charity Safe In
Our World announced a free mental
health training programme for
community managers. James is
incredibly happy to see the initiative.
“It’s huge, and I’m surprised it wasn’t
done earlier,” he says. “I left
community management because of
harassment and stress. I started
having stress ulcers.” Hopefully, thisTOP: Getting just five
matches of Rainbow
Six Siege in a row
without teamkills is
depressingly tricky.
ABOVE: Creative
Assembly (Tot al Wa r)
is just one studio
where Will served as
community manager.one of the first videos that we did
just so happened to be an
International Women’s Day video.
And it’s so inoffensive, it’s just ‘here’s
a bunch of women who work at
Splash Damage, here’s what they do’.
And I think one woman said ‘you
know, in my experience, it has been
kind of difficult sometimes for these
reasons’. Obviously, that garners
negative reaction.”
“Some people point towards ideas
of masculinity,” says Dr Lamont, “and
the idea that gaming communities
have become, or were originally seen
as, very male spaces which are nowhowever. Sometimes, when negative
behaviour begins in a community, it’s
easy for it to spread if it is not very
quickly stamped out – and people
can begin to engage in behaviour
they otherwise never would have. It
could happen to any of us, given the
right circumstances.
Dr Dean Burnett is a
neuroscientist and author who’s
written about everything from mental
health, to why you can walk into a
room and then forget why you went
there. He explains the potential for
extreme behaviour within groups in
terms of something that is called
group polarisation. “We’re social
creatures, but we’re also very
hierarchical, we are really concerned
with status, we want to be respected
by others, we want them to look up
to us or like us... the main way we do
it is to earn the approval of the group.
So if you have a group that is
consistent in that we all think this
one thing, we all believe this thing...
you try to embody the group beliefs
as much as possible.”
Nonetheless, there’s no reason to
give people who engage in hateful
behaviour a free pass. Repugnant
personal beliefs can certainly play a
part. When I asked community
managers if there were any issues
more likely than others to spark
controversy or toxic behaviour, I was
time and again told that introducing
any kind of diversity – or even
acknowledging that it exists – was a
point of contention for toxic
elements. Max tells me of one
innocuous example that resulted in
some pushback.TOXIC CRUSADERS
“We did a video series called Ask
Splash,” he says, “which was, like I
was saying, about putting faces out
there, with their job title and people
talking about what their role is and
what their favourite games are. AndTRIPLE TROUBLE
These launches were memorable for all the wrong reasons
NO MAN’S SKY
The game was far from
what was seen in the first
trailer, and players were not
shy about yelling at Hello
Games about it. They
weren’t loving the alien.CYBERPUNK 2077
A vicious, vocal minority of
fans defended the game
with toxic behaviour prior
to release – then turned
their anger onto CDPR
when the game arrived.FALLOUT 76
Some fans were ferocious
when Fallout’s take on
MMOs launched buggy, a
situation that Bethesda’s
reluctance to comment on
only made worse.