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No one should have to “grow a thicker skin”: Valorant studio commit to harsh penalties for harassment
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I've never played a game that didn't let you block and/or mute people you're playing with. That doesn't make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation? Taking care of it yourself is much faster and doesn't depend on convincing someone else that what's happening needs to be dealt with. You can block people for having the wrong favorite color if you want to.
There's too much inconsistency in what people perceive to be inappropriate behavior for a central authority to have the final say on the matter. Moderator action should be reserved for situations that explicitly violate the law, and even that varies significantly based on location and interpretation. It's much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
Because the devs/mods have the power to at least attempt to remove the person from the game before anyone else has to suffer their comments.
It's pretty simple to enable mod actions, too. Game devs make a list of rules about what you can and can't say. You agree to those rules when you start playing the game. Breaking the rules earns you a punishment. If you don't like it, you don't play the game. If the rules are unfairly restrictive then people won't play the game and it will fail. This is how internet moderation has worked since forever.
Yes that is how moderation has worked in some places in the past. It's also been historically unpaid volunteer work and not particularly effective, especially at large scales. Most of the people here have at least one story about bad moderation on reddit precisely because that kind of moderation is inefficient and heavily influenced by the personal bias of the moderator reviewing a report. You still needed to block people on a regular basis if you wanted to both participate and avoid harassment from a subset of users. That's how it is all over the internet and there is nothing that can be done to completely remove that element of online activity. Hence the need for thicker skin.
Well yeah, that's why part of Riot's solution seems to be adding more mods. I'd be more understanding if Riot didn't have the resources to add more paid mod support, but I truly don't think that's the case. So yeah, pay more mods and use more advanced technology to flag communication, I think that's an attainable goal.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't still protect themselves by blocking harassment, but I believe it's perfectly within devs' abilities to at least attempt to remove the most heinous bullies from the game.
While that is true in many respects, voice chat is quite difficult to police compared to text chat. I'm not sure how you go about automating or even monitoring that without recording everything people say using your service. Which then brings up a whole host of issues from data storage costs to privacy concerns to consent to record laws. You pretty much have to rely on users to submit evidence of their claims and that leads us back to the idea that users need to expect to have an active role in enforcing any sort of moderation policy.
It doesn't bring up any issues to record people for moderation purposes, if it's in the Terms of Service of whatever service/game you're using. Agreeing to the ToS is a form of contract. CoD's voice chat, for example, is already monitored and recorded.
Also, as voice recognition with AI is getting better, so will the effectiveness of those moderation tools. Not just in terms of speed but also in terms of cost.
Just because they're already doing it doesn't mean there's no issues with it.
Well, there aren't. If people sign a contract and aren't aware of what it says, that's their own problem. And gaming is a commodity, so it's not like you HAVE to sign that contract if you disagree with it. Just don't play the game then.
You can say there's no issues with that system as many times as you like but it's not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I'm one of them. You don't seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I'm not going to bother writing out why here but I've said more on the topic in this thread if you'd like to understand another perspective more clearly.
Again, did you click through and watch the actual clip? Rape threats are against the law in many/most jurisdictions.
I'm not a lawyer but it is my understanding of US law that something like what you see in the video does not meet the legal definition of a threat. There is no indication that the offender knows the real identity or location of the person they are speaking to, both of which are required to establish the intent necessary to define something as a threat in the legal sense of the word. Furthermore, the person speaking appears to be from another country, likely the UK or Australia, both of which have different laws than the US. Is Riot supposed to evaluate this situation based on the laws of the country in which they have their corporate HQ, the country the speaker resides in, or the country in which the listener resides? I don't think a lawyer in any of those three countries would advise this streamer to press charges based on the content of this video alone which would indicate that this kind of behavior is not illegal. Perhaps it should be, but that's another matter entirely.
To reiterate, none of this is meant to be interpreted as a defense of what that guy said. It's just to illustrate the point that moderation is not a simple thing to enforce even in situations where a surface level evaluation seems like it should be. It's much simpler to mute this guy or leave the lobby or whatever else you feel like you need to do to protect yourself. The unfortunate reality remains that people like this will always be around no matter what system is in place to minimize their impact. That's not to say that no steps should be taken with that goal in mind, just that when all is said and done you will always bear some responsibility in protecting yourself from content or behavior you don't want to be exposed to.
If you can play from say the UK, and you pay money for the game or access to it's Internet or components, they are doing business in the UK, and hence their business, business interactions and everything are subject to UK laws.
Seriously, we let companies get away with too much. If you provide public spaces, you are responsible for some degree of safety in/on them, and that includes certain personal safety, protection from libel, slander and threats. Likewise if you do business in a country and can make money from customers there, you are responsible for adhering to those countries laws. Want to do business in >200 countries? Yeah, you now have to adhere to >200 sets of laws.
Now you could say "But it'd suck if so many companies no longer release their products globally!". Sure. OTOH, it sucks much more that companies shirk responsibilities constantly. Companies are supposed to be like persons. So like a person, require them to adhere to local laws and show at least some degree of decency.
And no, it's ridiculous to assume someone should take steps to protect themselves. It's a failure of society that we have to do that for something as deranged as online rape or death threats. Because we let both the aggressor and the conductor get away with it, exactly in the way you do, by immediately putting the onus onto the victim.
Ok so what exactly is your proposal? We've already established that what happened in this video is not illegal based on the laws of any of the countries that the people involved likely live in so what's next? How do you go from where we are now to the system you want to see implemented?
You're talking about abstract ideas and I'm talking about actionable realities. The two often conflict with each other. The world you're describing isn't the one we live in so if you you want to make it a reality you need to get much more specific about how to implement your vision. It's easy to say "do more" when you don't have to worry about the resources required or side effects of what you're asking for.
Normally I'd agree with the blanket statement that companies are allowed to get away with too much but the way you're applying that argument here doesn't make sense. You're also saying that people don't have any responsibility to protect themselves and I just can't agree with that statement. It's way too idealistic to be applicable to real life in any significant way.