Game communities that should be a source of joy are often hotbeds of abuse. Gamergate brought headlines in 2014-15, but hostility to women, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ people and other underrepresented groups continues.
Madison Plantier, Senior Community & Social Media Manager at publisher Kwalee is on the frontline dealing with abusers and trolls daily. She has decided to share her experience working in games – watching them firsthand get hijacked by sinister trends and unhinged criticisms of ‘woke’ stories – and what she thinks we all need to do to fix the problem.
You can get a sense of the scale of the problem even just by looking at a single game. Take the upcoming title The Precinct – Madison is one of the community moderators. In it you play as rookie beat cop Officer Nick Cordell Jr. in the 1980s, cleaning up the streets of fictional Averno City dealing with everything from parking fines, car chases and drug deals. It’s a lot of fun, with a neon-noir aesthetic and a city with a sandbox of procedurally generated crimes to sink your teeth into.
Officer Nick Cordell Jr. is also a black man. Despite the viral buzz and enthusiasm for the game, this has sparked backlash.
Madison said: “The game has been attacked for ‘forced diversity’ and someone tried to explain that there were no ‘black cops’ in America in the 80s. There were many serving in the real American precincts that inspired the game. Plus this is still a fictional game city.”
“Some of these incidents end up escalating to outright threats towards us. I’ve had someone who was banned for making racist comments tell me via direct messages that they are going to break my bones. That if they ever see me, they’ll spit in my face. Then they ask: ‘please unban me’ as if nothing happened. And this is indicative of a wider problem. Abusive comments to moderators and other players are becoming an increasing issue throughout all of our communities.”
Where does all this abuse come from?
Madison sees a resurgence of online policing of the content of games. Woke watchdogs patrol stores to find offending content and refuse to buy the game if their demands aren’t met. She believes it’s an abuser mentality – the desire for a certain group of people to have control over another group of people.
She’s noticed an even more sinister trend – often the most abuse comes from people that don’t even care about the game in question. Instead, there’s whole groups who come into communities, to destabilise and bring them down. They don’t care about games, they care about controlling who is and isn’t allowed to play. This gatekeeping of gaming is frightening – to them it’s a war.
Women are common targets. As representation of women in games has improved and become more diverse, the backlash has continued to pour in. Men in games can be capable of incredible feats, but as soon as a woman does it, it’s unrealistic. People seem to have more of a problem with playing as a woman than a bear. Because the market is already flooded with white male video game characters, more diversity feels like they’re losing a seat at the table. This of course ignores the perspective that female and LGBT gamers have had to play as straight, white characters for years.
There’s a horrific trend of ‘fixing women’ – taking characters, like Aloy from the Horizon series, and editing them until they look satisfactorily feminine. Madison has seen charts that measure female game character jawlines, along with people who are literally talking about it all day. It often goes back to a moral panic over trans people and complaints that women in games look too manly. This is a worrying level of obsession by people that don’t see women as humans.
Players have complained to her that Kwalee is an ambassador of the not for profit Women in Games. Madison is unsure whether they know they are talking to a woman or whether they just don’t care.
Much of the abuse seems irrational. For example, Madison manages the communities for The Spirit of the Samurai. It’s set in feudal Japan, but there’s been complaints that it’s ‘forced diversity’ that you have to play as a Japanese person. Players complain far less that you also play as a cat, samurai or forest spirit.
What does life look like for a Community Manager who has to deal with this at work?
“It gets very tiring to repeat these same arguments – they’re never in good faith because the other side has an agenda, trying to drag politics unnecessarily into games. My role as a Community Manager is to de escalate – to see how I can get through to and be kind to these people, but they have come to specifically steamroll over others, say horrible things and cause trouble.
“It feels like we’re at the edge of a cliff, and if it tips over it becomes unsafe. It upsets me that people in my community don’t feel safe, or are witch-hunted. When I grew up, I felt isolated as a female gamer, if I beat people I thought it was a fluke. I stopped playing online and multiplayer games. Thankfully, now it’s shifted into a more positive space. But the people who don’t like this are more vocal and the more ground they lose to representation, they fight back harder.”
Kwalee is an indie games publisher, which can be a significant advantage, as indie games have a better track record at diverse representation than big-budget, mass-market AAA games. However, other publishers can even be complicit. For example, Helldivers 2 has faced allegations that they silenced LGBT+ voices asking for representation as a show of political neutrality which only emboldened the hatred around the game.
You have to be tough to be a Community Manager. This worries Madison as it’s a popular entry point into the industry. “That’s a problem if it’s abusive and offputting – it impacts the desire of good people to be in the industry. It also impacts big gaming companies when making commercial decisions with a deafening roar of ‘go woke go broke’ and a money-lined history of using sex to sell.”
How can we heal toxic communities?
Madison believes the solution is a mixture of resilience and continuing to push for more representation, regardless of how tough it is to battle through the wall of backlash.
As a Community Manager, she knows she needs to be empathetic, but thick skinned enough so that you don’t take abuse personally. This balance allows you to help the right people – and separate trolls from players genuinely hurt out of frustration.
“People may see abusive games trolls as a minority, but there’s more people out there than we think there are. If we pretend otherwise, we’ll only cause more problems. Vulnerable people shut out of representation have to ask themselves every day – do I actually belong? That’s a decision we don’t see. We need to prove to ourselves that we matter.”
Madison plans to continue doing what she loves – working in and playing video games.
What is her message to gamers?
“If you choose not to play the game because of what the main character looks like, it’s very sad.”
