Coming Together to Create a Playbook for Prosocial Game Design

news.blizzard.com:

When Natasha Miller joined Blizzard’s Player Interactions & Trust (PIT) team 5.5 years ago, she was one of the first people hired to work on the powerful machine-learning tech that now automatically screens reported voice and text chat logs in many of our games—the original primary focus of the PIT team. 

In the process, Natasha—a Senior Research Scientist with a behavioral science background and a member of the Fair Play Alliance executive steering committee—realized that even though the screening technology is a vast improvement compared to the tools it replaced, it still requires that players misbehave before something can be done about it.  

Natasha has since forged a new path at Blizzard with this problem in mind, spinning up and leading a new, second focus for her team aimed entirely at getting ahead of bad behavior and encouraging the good kind. This focus on “Behavior by Design” is not about creating a moderation tool or reactive system but mapping proactive frameworks and best practices for designing games that encourage respectful interactions between players while also examining the root(s) of what causes the opposite. 

Rewarding positive behavior is the most obvious manifestation of this, like the Overwatch 2 endorsement system that’s helped reduce disruptive chat by over 30%, but it can take many other forms. For instance, the team has found that warning players preemptively about a chat message warranting a penalty can help significantly reduce the number of repeat offenders. Another form it’s taking is setting play expectations, like the recently added social contract for World of Warcraft that players must agree to before loading in. A multipronged approach like this is necessary as there isn’t a single