Creative Assembly Says a Moderator Makes the Difference in Fighting Toxicity

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year: the Develop Conference in Brighton, England today! Wooo! Hope you got some popcorn because it’s time to go crazy with sober discussions on game development! One such discussion was held yesterday, lead by Creative Assembly’s Grace Carroll, and once everyone calmed down and stopped pouring drinks, they got down to business of discussing the issue of toxicity in their community.

GamesIndustry.biz wrote up the big, long detailed post about the meeting, but since we don’t plagiarize (much) here, here’s the highlight for our proposes: the issue of toxicity and the solution - moderation.

"Our forums were highly toxic. Because our games are about wars and things, it can get quite political, and our [Steam] forums were just not a very nice place to be. [And] If you have a toxic audience it's going to stay that way, because the nice people are going to leave. They don't want to be in that environment."

 
Carol was tasked with finding a way to make the toxic community that had come to surround their game disappear. And while that might seem like an impossible task, given how pro-toxicity the games community tends to be, Grace found that the solution was shockingly simple: hire a moderator.

"Just having that visible presence of moderation, knowing that someone was deleting threads and banning people, turned it around in about a week…the minute that people were getting bans, and the minute they realized that, A, there are consequences for their behaviour and they couldn't just do and say whatever they wanted, and B, that they weren't just shouting into a void and they were being heard.”

Now, that’s an interesting take: that people are only jerks because they think no one is watching. It might not work for every community, but it worked for Creative Assembly, so it might work for others, too!

That’s cool. You should read the whole article to see just how cool it was.