Is any progress being made against online anti-social behaviour? | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

If there's one topic that's remained resolutely evergreen in the games business for the past couple of decades, it's the topic of online anti-social behaviour and how best to police it.

Since the earliest days of online gaming, there have been a minority of players who ruin the experience for other people, and a discussion about how best to tackle that problem.

In the early days, that discussion was often somewhat philosophical in nature – questions of how to balance some high-minded ideas about freedom of expression against creating a welcoming environment for all players were debated by the operators of Quakeworld servers and gaming IRC channels at a length that would have given the founders of actual nations pause.

Today, the philosophical discussions have mostly been overridden by commercial realities – online anti-social behaviour costs money. It drives existing players away, makes it harder to acquire new players, makes word-of-mouth effects negative, and damages per-user revenues. Tackling it is a commercial imperative.

And yet, it's hard to pinpoint much actual progress in that regard in recent years. From the perspective of the average gamer, the issues around abusive behaviour and hate speech in online games seem to be getting worse, not better, with the only real improvement coming from the number of games which have effectively thrown up their hands in despair and disabled most communication features by default.

The aggressively unpleasant nature of online gaming communications has become a widespread public meme, a powerfully negative reputation that has spread well beyond the world of online gaming itself.

Any time a public figure (be they a celebrity or simply social media's latest unwilling whipping